Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago's Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington 9780226130729

Citation preview

Crucibles of Black Empowerment

historical studies of urban america Edited by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, James R. Grossman, and Becky M. Nicolaides

Also in the series: Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York by Cindy R. Lobel The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1971 by Christopher Lowen Agee Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto by Camilo José Vergara Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run by Sarah Jo Peterson Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities by Lawrence J. Vale Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago by Lilia Fernandez Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 by Richard Harris Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities by Carl H. Nightingale Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago by Tobias Brinkmann In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930 by Peter C. Baldwin Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain by Mark Peel Additional series titles follow index

Crucibles of Black Empowerment Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington

jeffrey helgeson

the university of chicago press

chicago and london

jeffrey helgeson is assistant professor at Texas State University. He is also a director at Labor Trail, a collaborative project of the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-13069-9 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-13072-9 (e-book) doi: 10.7208 / chicago / 9780226130729.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Helgeson, Jeffrey, author. Crucibles of black empowerment : Chicago’s neighborhood politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington / Jeffrey Helgeson. pages cm — (Historical studies of urban America) isbn 978-0-226-13069-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-13072-9 (e-book) 1. African Americans—Political activity—Illinois—Chicago. 2. Chicago (Ill.)—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Historical studies of urban America. f548.9.n4h45 2014 323.1196'073077311—dc23 2013043971 o This paper meets the requirements of ansi / niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book is dedicated to Mary (Keefe) Helgeson, Roger Helgeson, Anne Halsey, Charles Helgeson, Sadie Helgeson, Jesse Helgeson, and all those who are among the proudly restless Americans working to identify the individuals and institutions that maintain inequality and exclusion in a land of plenty, while never giving up on the potential for seemingly small countermeasures to add up to monumental democratic change.

Contents List of Figures and Maps Introduction

ix

1

1.

The Politics of Home in Hard Times

25

2.

Community Development in an Age of Protest, 1935–40

3.

“Will ‘Our People’ Be Any Better Off after This War?” 81

4.

A Decent Place to Live: The Postwar Housing Shortage

5.

Capitalism without Capital: Postwar Employment Activism 162

6.

Sources of Black Nationalism from the 1950s to the 1970s

7.

Harold Washington: Black Power and the Resilience of Liberalism 238

Postscript: The Obamas and Black Chicago’s Long Liberal Tradition 278 Acknowledgments 287 Notes

295

Index

353

48

118

201

Figures and Maps f ig ur e s 1. Rev. Addie L. Wyatt, c. 1950s / 7 2.

Looking south from 3800 South Calumet Avenue / 36

3.

“Blighted” housing on South Parkway near the border of Douglas and Grand Boulevard / 72

4.

Number of black workers employed in major industry groups expressed as a percentage of total employment in Cook and Du Page Counties, March 1940 and January 1945 / 95

5.

Length of residency in Chicago of people who applied to the Chicago Urban League’s “Social Problems” Office between 1946 and 1949 / 126

6.

“Typical Site Dwelling,” cleared for the Dearborn Homes / 137

7.

“Squatters lived here.” Houses cleared for the Dearborn Homes / 138

8.

“Home, Sweet Home” and “Hotel for Men,” cleared for the Dearborn Homes / 138

9.

“Last family moves” from Dearborn Homes clearance site / 142

10. Chicago Urban League, “Spotlighting Disorganization Here” / 147 11. Chicago Urban League “Seeding Party,” 4700 South Langley Avenue, April 19, 1952. Includes photograph of “Mr. Rector on a house canvas to enlist cooperation” / 148 12. Goodwin-built houses, looking west on 91st Place / 153 13. Remodeled Lilydale Cottage, 9128 South Lafayette Street / 157 14. Remodeled Lilydale Cottage, 9427 South LaSalle Street / 157

figures and maps

x

15. Scale of the Chicago Urban League’s job placement programs, 1946–53 / 173 16. Timuel Black speaking at a 1969 meeting of the Englewood Community Congress / 187 17. North Kenwood–Oakland residents’ length of residency at current address and in Chicago in 1956 / 223 18. Members of ACT! protest against the Chicago Freedom Movement’s leadership at Soldier Field in 1966 / 244 19. Martin Luther King Jr. shaking hands on Chicago’s West Side, 1966 / 245 20. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to a crowd on the West Side, 1966 / 245 maps 1. The South Side Black Metropolis, 1939 / 29 2.

Race percentages and numbers of housing conversions per block in 1939 in the Douglas neighborhood where Eliza Chilton Johnson, Bertha Neighbors, and Lucille Wright lived / 32

3.

Race percentages and housing conditions per block in 1939 in the Douglas neighborhood where Eliza Chilton Johnson, Bertha Neighbors, and Lucille Wright lived / 33

4.

Geographic distribution of the Chicago Urban League’s “Social Problems” clients, 1946–49, northern detail of the Near South Side south to Pershing Road (3900 south) / 128

5.

Geographic distribution of the Chicago Urban League’s “Social Problems” clients, 1946–49, southern detail of Grand Boulevard and Washington Park, from Pershing Road (3900 south) to 60th Street / 129

6.

Geographic distribution of the Chicago Urban League’s “Social Problems” clients, 1946–49, showing patterns of movement of the thirty-four clients who reported previous Chicago addresses / 131

7.

Race percentages by block in North Kenwood–Oakland, 1939 / 220

8.

Chicago Urban League’s February 1957 map of “Chicago’s Negro residential areas as related to urban renewal” / 229

introduction

Chicago: City of Destruction and Crucible of Black Power

A

ddie Wyatt remembered the move to Chicago as a lesson in disappointment. As a child in Brookhaven, Mississippi, she had watched with pride as her mother taught school, her father worked as a skilled tailor, and her grandmother, a midwife, cared for the families in her community. In 1930, when she was six years old, her family packed up and moved to Chicago to join relatives. “Many people in the South,” she remembered later, “thought that the North, especially Chicago, was the land of promise.”1 Addie did not go so far as to say the move was a mistake, but the North was certainly not all it was said to be. “We thought surely that our lives would be much better if we moved north, and God only knows how we suffered.” Contrary to their dreams, Chicago brought hardship without even the compensation of being close to nature or the familiarity that the South had offered. “There were no gardens, no fields, no chickens, no hogs of your own, no fruit trees.” In the South they had “had fairly decent homes,” but in Chicago, “we lived wherever we could.”2 In many ways, Chicago was a “city of destruction” for black families like Wyatt’s.3 To make a life in the city required the ability to improvise and hard-nosed persistence. It required taking advantage of whatever support networks newcomers had at their disposal. Wyatt’s family of eight initially moved in with her aunt and her family of four. Twelve people in a single apartment—this was supposed to be temporary, but “my parents couldn’t find work.”4 Her mother could not teach because she was not certified in Illinois, and she had to take domestic service jobs. Her father generally came home empty-handed from daily job searches, walking up and down the long blocks of South Side black Chicago from

2

introduction

43rd Street to 109th Street. When he could find temporary jobs he worked fifty- or sixty-hour weeks “doing a little tailoring, a little pressing, a little work here and there.”5 Addie, the oldest daughter, had to supplement the family income and began to teach music lessons after school at the age of twelve. Without a steady income, they “didn’t qualify for a decent place to live, so we had to take places wherever we could and moved from one place to another.”6 Uprooted, displaced, and surrounded by neighbors going through similar struggles to find jobs and housing, Wyatt’s father, in particular, struggled to keep hope. The trials of life in Depression-era black Chicago could destroy people and Addie watched it happen to her father, whose disappointment pushed him to distance himself from his family and to turn to alcohol as “a means of escape.”7 In retrospect, however, Addie Wyatt’s life history is not, ultimately, a story about despair or escape. It is a story that epitomizes the combination of frustration and hope that defined black Chicago’s long history of community-based activism. During and after the Great Depression, Wyatt and thousands of black Chicagoans in similar circumstances sustained efforts to improve the quality of life in local communities. They worked to improve neighborhoods, secure decent housing, win good jobs, and build the political power to increase individual access to all these measures of the good life in the city. After the World War II economic boom ended the Depression, Chicago turned out to be a place where great suffering mixed with increasing access to economic and political opportunities— at least for some of the city’s black residents. Consequently, thousands of ordinary people like Wyatt found inspiration both to fight against oppression and to foster locally based initiatives for self-help and community development. In the process, black Chicagoans created resilient local bases of power and a long and rich tradition of black liberal politics. Out of struggles to counter racism and economic exclusion day after day, they constructed a political culture in which pragmatic nationalism and a commitment to opening the city for individual opportunity overlapped with the long history of more radical labor and civil rights activism. How did Addie Wyatt turn this “city of destruction” into a crucible of black power?8 Part of her story can be explained by her personal toughness and perseverance. Even in the worst of experiences, she found inspiration to fight for a better life for herself and the people around her. In her father’s struggles, she saw more than anything a reason to act on behalf of others, something “that made me very, very determined to do what I could to help poverty stricken people and to help wage earners to earn

introduction

3

a decent and livable wage.”9 And in her work to establish her own family while also giving back to her community, Wyatt ultimately developed a distinguished career as an activist with deep foundations in her neighborhood, her church, and her labor union. Addie Wyatt met and fell in love with her husband, Claude, when she was just fourteen years old. By the end of her sixteenth year they were married. “We thought we could better our own lives,” Wyatt explained, “by getting married and going on our own.”10 So she dropped out of school while her husband found work at a dry cleaner for eight dollars a week, and then a job at the Armour packing plant for twenty-six dollars a week. Claude and Addie dreamed of going to college and creating the life of a black professional couple. Claude would work, and she saw herself staying home “to be a full time housewife . . . to rear children and be a youth leader.” They never quite found the way. After she had her first child at age sixteen, she gave birth again eighteen months later. “I thought I’d be pregnant the rest of my life,” she remembered.11 In the meantime, she applied for a job as a typist at Armour & Company. She got the job, but when she showed up for work they “sent me straight to the canning department.”12 A teenage mother who had to work, but who also found that the employment options were limited for black women in Chicago, Wyatt grew up quickly. To make ends meet, they turned to their family networks and lived with their parents. Soon, though, tragedy struck, disrupting plans again. In 1944, Addie’s mother died at the age of thirty-nine. With her father sick and incapable of caring for children, Addie and Claude took in her five littlest brothers and sisters. “Every morning was a child care crisis,” Addie remembered, and every day another trial in “trying to hold my job.” The troubles piled up. “We didn’t have a decent place to live. . . . We lived in a terrible rat infested apartment, rats as big as cats. Sometimes we’d have to fight them off the children.” But no one would rent to her and Claude, such a young couple with so many children to care for. Then Claude was drafted into the Navy. “I had just lost my mother. My husband and I had never been in a war before. . . . It seemed as if our world had come to an end.”13 But she saw a ray of hope. “I applied for an apartment in a housing project,” the Altgeld Gardens Project on the far South Side built for defense workers, “because I felt that this would be a means of getting some place decent to live.” She got a break when she and Claude finally secured a placement interview with the Chicago Housing Authority. To qualify for

4

introduction

the apartment, she had to quit her meatpacking job and find a position in a defense plant. She ended up cutting shells for the Army at the Ammunition Container Company in the suburb of Harvey, Illinois. As she worked and hoped for another interview for the public housing apartment, Wyatt kept up an extraordinarily hectic schedule. She was living with her mother-in-law in Robbins, five miles from the plant in Harvey, traveling ten miles north to her father’s apartment in the city to help take care of her brothers and sisters, and visiting Claude as often as possible at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center sixty miles north of Robbins. When she did get another meeting with the CHA, she told the interviewer of her plight and had an apartment the next week. It was a huge relief. “I’ve owned two homes since then,” she recalled, “but I’ve never experienced the pride and excitement I felt when I walked into my Altgeld Gardens apartment consisting of a living room, kitchen, utility room, three bedrooms, and a bath.”14 The kinds of struggles Wyatt lived through in her personal life were commonplace in black Chicago. Struggles to meet the day-to-day needs of work and home life became, for so many people, wrapped up in broader efforts to open the city. Addie’s life story, however, points to something much more than just an extraordinary person rising above the suffering of her neighbors. As a working mother, a union leader, a minister, a civil rights activist, and a powerful political figure, Wyatt tapped into the central institutions of the city that allowed black Chicagoans to continually remake their lives and communities. She may have been extraordinary for her accomplishments, but her commitment to community-based efforts to address the immediate challenges of overlapping systems of race, class, and gender inequality was characteristic of black Chicago’s political culture. The institutions black Chicagoans used to improve the quality of life in their local communities varied widely. Wyatt, first and foremost, built her efforts on a foundation constructed by women in her family, her schools, and her church. Wyatt’s mother and grandmothers were models of how to simultaneously support the family and the community with their work. She followed the example of black female teachers who “were authoritative.” And in the Church of God, Wyatt remembered that women and young girls “were always encouraged to accept leadership.” Women were ministers, choir leaders, ushers, secretaries, and trustees. “We were trained” to take leadership roles.15 The leadership skills and capacity for struggle that she took away from the women in her family and church prepared Wyatt to be one of the most effective community builders in Chi-

introduction

5

cago’s history. Wyatt did what thousands of women and men like her have done for generations, she built independent, “parallel” black institutions that sought to improve the quality of life in their communities and to construct a base for greater economic and political power. Wyatt followed in the footsteps of the women around her as a church and neighborhood leader. In the decade after World War II, Wyatt and her husband directed a community choir and Bible study group out of Altgeld Gardens, a group that many former members credit with saving their lives and giving them direction.16 The Wyatts remembered, for example, taking in a young homeless kid who turned his life around and became a seminary professor at North Park College. They also remembered finding a young man asleep on the street, drunk, and taking him into the chorus. With their help, he went back to school, eventually earning a PhD and becoming executive director of the Wyatts’ Vernon Park Church of God.17 For years, the Wyatts stayed in touch with former choir members, who would write letters thanking them for their help. “Had it not been for this channel, this citadel,” one former member wrote, “we don’t know what would have happened to many of our young people.”18 When they moved out of Altgeld Gardens in 1955, the Wyatts built a new home for their community work, founding the Vernon Park Church of God. By the 1970s, their church had over one thousand members and it had become a significant site in the city’s community organizing efforts, civil rights movement, and black independent political movement.19 Like many other community-minded church leaders in the city, the Wyatts routinely worked across denominational boundaries, with Baptist churches and even the Nation of Islam, to fight crime and bring resources into their community. The Wyatts also played a key role in organizing support for Harold Washington’s run to become the first black mayor of Chicago, with Addie Wyatt, in particular, reaching out to the neighborhood, labor, and church networks she had built among women in the city.20 As she established herself in the communities where she would become a leader in local organizing and, eventually, city politics, Wyatt found another institution that would complement her efforts to improve her own career prospects as well as the overall quality of life in black Chicago. Just a few months after starting the defense industry job in Harvey, she was laid off and returned to Armour & Company, where she was able to work while holding onto the defense housing apartment because it was not her choice to leave the munitions plant.21 In 1944, she thus settled for good in meatpacking, where she found the benefits of union membership.22 Just

6

introduction

before Wyatt began working in meatpacking, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) had won its first contract.23 The Great Depression in Chicago, as in other major manufacturing cities, coincided with the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), an interracial industrial union movement that opened doors for working-class people to higher wages, better working conditions, and new outlets to engage in politics.24 For years, Wyatt recounted a story about her first encounter with the union, describing it as an institution that facilitated her work to benefit her immediate family and her larger community. I wanted to make money, but most importantly I wanted to make life better for myself, and for my family, and for all of the other families. It was in the organized labor movement when I first started that I got the clue that I needed: that life can be better, but you’ll have to make it so. I learned that alone I could not do it. But I learned the great lesson that if I united with other workers who were also trying to make their lives better that together we could do much to make a difference in our lives. And that’s why I joined the union.25

Just a few months after joining the union, she took a leave of absence because she was pregnant. She was worried because she did not believe that she would be able to get her job back after her baby was born. But the union helped her win a grievance and she did, indeed, return to work after a one-year of leave of absence, without losing seniority. “I cannot tell you how moving this was to me. . . . That turned my clock on. Because I decided workers needed to have a union if they were going to make life better for themselves and their families.”26 Initially, Wyatt was a rank-and-file union worker focusing her activism on the community in Altgeld Gardens. In 1953, things changed dramatically. As part of the UPWA’s push to recruit more female leaders, Wyatt ran for, and won, the vice-presidency of her local union.27 She then jumped headlong into union activism, becoming what historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has referred to as a key twentieth-century “labor feminist,” helping to build the “other women’s movement” that provided an alternative to the more individualistic, middle-class “second wave” feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1954, she became the first woman to serve as the president of a local union in the UPWA. In 1961, Eleanor Roosevelt appointed Wyatt to serve on the Labor Legislation Committee of President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women. In the 1970s, she was one of the founders of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and became a nationally recognized figure in the battle for passage of

introduction

7

fig. 1. Rev. Addie L. Wyatt, c. 1950s. CULR-04-189-2136-001, Chicago Urban League Records, Department of Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

the Equal Rights Amendment. Time named her as one of the magazine’s “Women of the Year” in 1975. By the late twentieth century, few women could claim more public renown, more experience in labor organizing, or a more deeply informed perspective on the challenges women faced as workers and family members. Wyatt helped foster a self-consciously working-class feminism that saw labor unions as a primary institutional base for political and economic progress.28 While rising on the national stage, she did as much as anyone to sustain the labor movement as a force in black Chicago’s political culture. Wyatt always combined labor and community-based activism. Her political career, like the broader narrative of black Chicago’s political history, exemplified the cross-fertilization of radicalism and liberalism, and

8

introduction

of labor and community-based politics. Her story shows how an era of protest politics and creativity could provide people with powerful new organizations—like the CIO—to promote their vision of social justice and community welfare. Wyatt’s story shows how community-based institutions, and a politics focused on pragmatic solutions to community problems, always overlapped with workplace and political organizing in black Chicago. For Wyatt, the struggle at work could never be separated from the struggle in her community. Better pay, seniority rights, a meaningful grievance system, and safe and healthy working conditions were all important in their own rights, but they also helped workers improve the quality of life for their families and their communities. Not coincidentally, as ministers, Addie and Claude Wyatt preached a “holistic gospel,” calling on followers to develop a faith that was based in a concern for individual, family, and community welfare, and which required involvement in “those institutions that can make this a reality,” including not just the church but also labor and community-based organizations.29 Wyatt would later insist that her work with her community was the priority. “I told my union’s leaders that I would never renege on my responsibility to my union, but I would never give up my church work. My family and my church work . . . are the foundation on which I am able to survive.”30 Wyatt and her fellow black Chicagoans developed a broad understanding of community, a vision that connected the home to the people and conditions in the neighborhood and beyond. As activists, they fought for improving access to opportunity and power in what historian Earl Lewis calls the “home sphere,” where “home meant both the household and the community” and where the environment affecting the home sphere included “the household, the neighborhood, the black community, the city, the state,” and beyond. With this vision of the world, black activists saw the connections between work and community, politics and everyday life, and individual opportunity and collective well-being.31 The question is not whether community- or workplace-based organizing was “more important,” but how concerns for the quality of life in one’s community shaped one’s engagement with the broader political battles over race, class, gender, and economic opportunity. People like Addie Wyatt have continually found new outlets for their preexisting political concerns. In the context of persistent unemployment, struggling neighborhoods, and the long-term growth of potential government resources, residents of segregated black communities, suffering disproportionately

introduction

9

because of institutional racism and economic inequality, found a wide variety of ways to engage in their local communities. The driving vision was that people could improve their own lives and the prospects of their community by engaging with something bigger than themselves. The continuous struggle to “advance the race” thus created tensions between individual and collective interests. As St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton noted in Black Metropolis, such tensions could be destructive, as “service” became a cover for “the desire for power and prestige,” even for “fraud, graft, and chicanery.”32 But the tensions between individual striving and racial advancement were also constructive, as in the case of Addie and Claude Wyatt, who turned their desires for a stable life in the city into a lifetime of community, religious, labor, and political activism. By the 1970s, Reverend Addie Wyatt, Vice President of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, was one of the most powerful women in the American labor and feminist movements, as well as a grassroots community leader in black Chicago. Wyatt resisted with equal passion the racial inequalities inside the labor movement and the attacks upon the nation’s workers mounted by an ascendant New Right conservative movement. She took the CIO to task for failing to place black workers in leadership positions between the 1930s and 1950s. She called attention to the persistence of “a dual labor market and discrimination on the job,” despite the ban on such discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And in 1982, at the National Summit Conference on Black Economic Development and Survival in Gary, Indiana, she spotlighted the race and class consequences of President Ronald Reagan’s policies, which fostered a high-unemployment, low-inflation economy. “Reaganomics,” she argued, amounted to “devices to set one group of workers against another, to the detriment of all workers in an economic depression!”33 Wyatt was quite capable of incisive commentary on the challenges workers faced as workers. Yet Wyatt was also deeply influenced by beliefs in the importance of self-help, individual responsibility, and black solidarity. This was an enduring vision, famously rooted in the politics of Booker T. Washington as well as in generations of day-to-day struggles for survival in black America.34 It was also a vision that Wyatt thought could be translated meaningfully into her career as a labor and community activist. She applied the lessons of self-help to people facing even the most difficult circumstances. As Wyatt said of the women living in Chicago’s Cabrini Green Housing Project—notorious for its crumbling buildings, crime, unemployment, and

10

introduction

gangs—they had a choice. They could either “succumb to their disheartening conditions. . . . Or they can come to grips with themselves and decide, first, ‘I am somebody and I refuse to be treated like I am nobody.’ Reach out beyond the boundaries of Cabrini Green, as difficult as it might be. Become a part of the church. . . . Become a part of other organizations and movements geared to improve their lives. Be an active participant in the political life of the community and the nation. Never stop reading and learning and struggling. Let this be an example to be to our young.”35 Wyatt’s vision was based on the idea that there were significant resources for people in difficult straits, resources that could be accessed both within black Chicago and across racial lines. In such a context, individual resilience could be a crucial part of building stronger communities. Wyatt, indeed, saw personal responsibility as part of a larger vision of community solidarity. When she stepped to the pulpit on Mother’s Day 1984 to speak on the subject, “Black Women Mothers—The Solution to the Crisis,” Wyatt called on the black women in her audience to take personal responsibility to improve the quality of life in their communities, and to use their individual action to strengthen the ties binding their communities together. “Black folks need to come together and deal with the problems that face us as a community,” Wyatt declared. “We can no longer afford the luxury of staying apart.” The giant redwood trees in California have surprisingly shallow roots, she explained. “The secret of the redwoods is that each tree links its roots with its fellow redwoods. Linkage is the key. . . . This is a powerful lesson that we as a black community cannot forget, that to be able to stand tall and proud as individuals we must link ourselves together as a community.” Yet she feared her generation was failing to heed the lesson. “For the first time we have bought into the myth that one person alone cannot make a difference. To buy into this myth is to be defeated before we have even started. Each of you here today has a responsibility to try and make a difference, for if you don’t . . . we are all doomed. . . . You can’t give up.”36 This was not the hidden conservatism of an otherwise radical labor feminist. Rather, Wyatt’s self-help and community-oriented politics grew out of a pragmatic response to the challenges of life in the city, as well as values deeply opposed to any vision of radical individualism. The key was to balance individual opportunity with collective responsibility, as she had seen the women in her life strive to do in even the most desperate situations. Wyatt’s story spans the chronology of this book, and she, more than anyone else, connects the long history of black liberalism in Chicago to the city’s episodic narrative of civil rights and black power unionism.

introduction

11

There is no stronger or more inspiring exemplar of the potential power of combining a critique of racism, sexism, and class inequality with a persistent struggle to improve the quality of life and increase individual opportunity in the home sphere. Wyatt’s story stands out because her efforts to strive for individual and collective opportunity took on powerful new dimensions through the interracial industrial union movement. But her story is far from unique and points to the evolution of what I call African American women’s “politics of home”—the diverse efforts of black women to engage with the institutions of the city in order to improve the quality of life in their local communities. Wyatt’s life story provides a fitting entry into the distinct but intertwined histories of the radical and liberal strains of the broad black freedom struggle. The two strains were both internally complex, and their proponents often conflicted with each other, yet their efforts always connected in the pragmatic concern with ordinary people’s everyday lives, and over the long run they deeply influenced each other. Wyatt brought a vibrant neighborhood network and a prophetic religious voice of support to Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign, and an uncompromising critique of gender inequality and what we might call today the politics of austerity to the planning of his administration’s programs. Her career indicates the long arc and deep significance of the interplay between community development and electoral political organizing, as well as between liberal individualist notions of fair play and more radical critiques of racial and economic inequality. Finally, as a migrant who made it in Chicago, Wyatt highlights why it is particularly important to tell a Chicago story. By paying close attention to Wyatt’s life, and the lives of many others like hers, we can see that Chicago was indeed both a city of destruction and a crucible of black power. Together, those stories confound decades of scholarly and popular arguments regarding black Chicagoans, especially black migrants, as the sources of social problems rather than the agents for their solution.37 And they force us to recognize that black urban political culture has been fundamental to the development of American liberalism.

The Structure of the Book To the existing narratives of black migration and urban history—the making of “American Apartheid” on the one hand and the northern freedom struggle on the other—I seek to add the narrative of black Chicagoans

12

introduction

whose everyday struggles for individual opportunity and radical advancement shaped a broader political culture.38 In theoretical terms, a historical reconstruction of black Chicago’s political culture at the ground level sheds light on the construction of black Chicagoans’ race, class, and gender identities, and their changing relationships to their local communities and the state as institutions, with at least the potential to improve their individual lives and contribute to the welfare of black Chicago as a whole. As political scientist Michael Hanchard has recently suggested, students of the black diaspora must describe “the relationships between the individual and the state, between collective and individual modes of political identification, and between material conditions and political agency (the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’).”39 In concrete terms, this history of black Chicago uncovers how a diverse black population accommodated to the city—how they found housing; how they related to their neighbors; what kinds of values about work, family, and religion they developed; and what kinds of formal politics they pursued or avoided. Through the sometimes prosaic work of everyday life, black Chicagoans struggled to better their condition and to make their lives more closely match the dreams they had brought with them to the city. There are two parallel narratives playing out here. The first is about the tensions between individual and collective interests that shaped everyday life, as people struggled with the balance between their individual success and their commitment to a broader community. The second is about tensions between the fundamentally radical desire to overthrow the structures of racial and economic exclusion black Chicagoans faced and the essentially liberal struggle to use the institutions of the city to reform the quality of life in local communities and open those institutions to broader democratic participation. With few exceptions, most histories of black activism tend to focus on a relatively narrow range of radical labor and civil rights struggles and protest politics. What has been left out, and what I hope to recover, is a complementary history of community building and largely neighborhood-based politics that reinforced longstanding traditions of self-help, racial uplift, and race-conscious liberal pragmatism that, together, represent perhaps the most durable political tradition in African American history. To tell this history of black political culture, I examine how African Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds used civil rights organizations, social work centers, social and block clubs, churches, trade unions, and political parties to strive for individual success and, at the same

introduction

13

time, to promote the cause of racial progress. I draw upon a wide range of sources, including interviews completed with black Chicagoans in the 1930s, a block-by-block land-use survey of Chicago, newspapers, photographs, and archival records of reform organizations. Unlike many other historians of black urban politics, my goal is not to recover models for radical democratic struggles against racism. Nor is this primarily a history of racial oppression (although systems of exclusion based on race, class, and gender form the necessary and always present context for this history). Instead, I mine the historical record for evidence of how the residents of black Chicago creatively adapted their community-building efforts in the face of constant challenges, from the Great Depression and World War II to the postwar housing shortage, slum clearance and urban renewal, ongoing employment discrimination exacerbated by the disappearance of jobs, the rise of civil rights and Black Power politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and the making of an independent black electoral politics that triumphed in the election of Mayor Harold Washington. In the first chapter, I examine community-based politics in Depressionera black Chicago, showing how African American women acted through churches, social clubs, and New Deal agencies to improve the quality of life in their local communities during the late 1930s. Black women’s “politics of home” in the 1930s took the forms of individual and collective responses to the impulse to work to find opportunity for local neighborhoods in the midst of crisis that extended into the formal political sphere as well, taking advantage of the more self-consciously radical and militant organizing of the time. As the second chapter shows, black Chicagoans in a variety of political, labor, and social organizations rallied around an effort to ensure the construction of the first public housing project for African Americans in the city, which culminated in the opening of the Ida B. Wells Homes in 1941. I argue that the efforts to bring the benefits of the New Deal to black Chicagoans and the battle for the Wells Homes not only energized the new protest politics of the 1930s but also helped create a foundation for a heterogeneous new generation of black Chicagoans primarily interested in community-based politics. The narrative then turns to community-building efforts during and after World War II. In Chicago, wartime jobs and the development of a federal employment bureaucracy reinforced the influence and status of the very groups that had benefited from the struggle for the Ida B. Wells Homes, including skilled black construction trades workers, white-collar

14

introduction

workers, and the members of race-conscious economic boycott organizations with deep ties to black politicians. In chapter 3, I examine the array of wartime relationships individual black Chicagoans forged with employers and the growing federal employment bureaucracy. The local office of the United States Employment Service (USES), located in the heart of black Chicago and run by local black residents, provided white-collar job openings to a select few African Americans, served as the conduit for black workers into defense industry jobs, and even helped local employment activists to fight discrimination in wartime industry. By following the Local USES Office #8 through the war and into the reconversion to a peacetime economy, I demonstrate how local residents differed in their ability to grab a piece of the wartime boom.40 Chapters 4 and 5 reveal that the uneven benefits of economic growth became all too apparent during the postwar era. It became clear not only that many black Chicagoans would not get access to better jobs, but also that a severe housing shortage and persistent employment discrimination affected African Americans differently depending upon their social status and physical location in the city. Black Chicagoans pursued a range of community and employment activism not accounted for in standard treatments dominated by either “machine” politics or the rise and fall of civil rights liberalism. Broad alliances working together for the shared goal of greater individual access to economic opportunity remained a critical part of black activists’ arsenal throughout the postwar period. Such alliances would be most effective between the late 1930s and the late 1940s and again from the mid-1960s to early 1970s. During the 1930s and 1940s, activists used mass protest tactics to pressure policymakers relatively effectively. In the postwar period, policymakers who thought of themselves as racial liberals worked to defuse political tensions and to prevent the recurrence of racial violence that had rocked American cities during World War II by rhetorically calling for racial understanding and, in some cases, moving in limited ways toward greater opportunities for black residents in housing, employment, education, and access to established political networks. By the end of the 1940s and especially in 1950s, however, the political calculus changed. The threat of racial violence provided less leverage as the concrete possibility of violence seemed to have receded. And American cities saw a drop in the use of protest politics in the late 1940s and 1950s. The reasons for the decline of militant protest are complex, and, in part, are the subject of the second half of this book. It is clear that a combination of factors were involved, including the

introduction

15

feeling among many black Chicagoans that things were actually getting better, the consolidation of a powerful Democratic political machine that sought to destroy black militancy, the influence of liberal foundations on black-led civil rights organizations, the broader context of McCarthyism and antiradicalism, and the need of the masses of black Chicagoans to concentrate on their immediate problems during a housing crisis of unprecedented proportions. Nonetheless, even in a period historians have described in terms of the repression of the long radical black tradition, everyday struggles to improve the quality of life in black communities created new arenas of friction that would give rise to renewed political activism in succeeding years. Chapter 4 examines the central challenge black Chicagoans faced in the years immediately after World War II, namely, the crisis of housing. The chapter tells stories of black Chicagoans who turned their energy and attention to the struggle to improve the quality of life within black communities. These are stories of self-help and community building in “the second ghetto.”41 Those efforts reflected a dynamic mix of desperation and individual ambition. They grew out of a defensive response to the violence and political repression that dominated housing politics in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as a positive commitment to building a strong self-consciously black community. And they illustrate the limits of liberal institutions such as the Chicago Urban League and the Chicago Housing Authority as allies for black Chicagoans, as well as how and why black residents, even in the most difficult of situations, maintained their commitment to local communities and sustained the networks that made those communities viable. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, a shift in employment opportunities for black workers exacerbated the growing physical and social distances between classes in northern urban African American communities like Chicago’s. As automation spread and industries moved away from the central city or closed down altogether, jobs for unskilled or semiskilled workers became increasingly rare. At the same time, new opportunities for black workers—especially black women—in the clerical and retail sectors began to emerge. Most black reformers in Chicago, however, continued to focus on trying to train and place black men in the remaining industries, the building trades, and in wholesale and retail service work. Chapter 5 reveals the persistence of these efforts, and their limits, even as new activists began challenging the traditional modes of polite negotiations with a revived focus on protest politics. Without allies in the city gov-

16

introduction

ernment committed to industrial development that would create or save jobs for black workers, the employment activists detailed here managed to help secure steady work for thousands of individuals, but they could not reverse a process by which black workers already suffering from individual and structural discrimination in the labor market saw the disappearance of jobs that had provided at least a toehold in the city for previous generations of black workers. The resulting frustration spurred two often conflicting responses: a new and more radical black power unionism, as well as a redoubled effort to work with the federal government to train and place black (male) workers on an ever increasing scale. The final two chapters reveal the growing tensions between liberalism and nationalism in black Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. Although chapter 5 deals with the history of the Nation of Islam (NOI), I generally do not use the term black nationalism in the way that the NOI did. I mean not an ideological commitment to black separatism per se but what Wahneema Lubiano describes as a “common sense” ideology “that emerges from African Americans’ daily experience with white racial privilege.”42 Chapter 6 seeks to explain why a popular, pragmatic black nationalism became increasingly influential between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Of course, part of the answer is that a Black Power movement arose with a new generation of activists arguing that liberalism had failed and that what was required was a total reconstruction of economic and political structures. But the Black Power era in Chicago was the product of a diverse set of individuals and institutions not necessarily sharing Black Power activists’ commitment to forging an alternative to capitalism or the vision of the development of a separate black political community. Chapter 6 argues that three institutions—Roosevelt University, the Nation of Islam, and the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO)—exemplified the varied institutions that gave rise to and popularized diverse forms of black nationalist politics while sustaining the older vision of black Chicagoans’ political goals between the late 1940s and early 1970s. In particular, and in different ways, they all fostered the desire to create a truly open city in which local residents would have real power over the fate of their communities and would have real equality of opportunity and choice in politics, education, housing, and employment. In chapter 7 I argue that black Chicago’s political culture—the raceconscious pragmatic liberalism that survived so many challenges—had its best moment in bringing an end to “plantation politics.” The election of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor tapped into a movement

introduction

17

for black political power independent of the city’s Democratic political machine, even though Washington himself was a product of that machine. The long-term movement for independent black political power overlapped with the day-to-day community-based politics on the ground. The same organizations that built and sustained black communities—the people working in the black craft economy, the organizers of the KOCO, the writers who had worked for Muhammad Speaks, Rev. Jesse Jackson and Operation Breadbasket, Rev. Addie Wyatt (through both the church she ran with her husband Rev. Claude Wyatt and the packinghouse union), the Chicago Urban League—all of these people and institutions played key roles in the rise of a new electoral movement. As they did, they literally built the housing and institutions that gave rise to an independent political ethos. And they also developed a hybrid political vision of democratic urban planning that aimed to link economic development to bringing jobs, housing, recreational spaces, and municipal services to workingclass communities. Washington’s campaign bridged the divides that separated black Chicagoans from one another. As mayor, Washington also acted upon the best liberal ideals of community development. He worked to create alliances across racial lines; indeed, he disappointed many of his supporters because he did not take enough advantage of his power over city contracts and patronage. And Washington made certain that during his administration plans for urban development would be driven by the primary desire to create jobs, rather than just to increase real estate values. In this way, Washington’s campaign and his mayoralty brought together the best of the “politics of home,” both its race-conscious pragmatic emphasis on economic development and its willingness to work across racial lines to bring resources to African American communities. Finally, in the postscript, I reflect on the meanings of the ambiguous history of the black liberal tradition in Chicago for our understanding of Michelle and Barack Obama’s rise to the White House and the possibility for a truly progressive liberalism to create a more open society. Black Chicago was no powerless monolithic ghetto; an individual’s fate in the city depended upon a combination of factors, including race, space, gender, skill level, and political and social connections. A view of twentieth-century African American urban history that recognizes the achievements and limits of everyday efforts to sustain neighborhoods and economic opportunities for black workers demands a set of narratives and images of personal histories that emphasizes the diversity and con-

18

introduction

tingency of life in the Black Metropolis as a whole. This is a narrative that must be able to account for the reality that black Chicago was always both a city of destruction and a crucible of black power.

The Long Tradition of Black Liberalism The results of the Second Great Migration were, and remain, deeply ambiguous. By 1970, black southerners in Chicago had created a Black Metropolis with over 1.2 million residents.43 As much as any other place in the United States, black Chicago had come to represent both the tragedy of racism and the triumph of black persistence in the face of racial exclusion. The Second Great Migration ended with the virtual decimation of the industrial working class, the creation of a new white-collar and service-sector working class, and the increasing physical and social distance between poor neighborhoods and stable communities in a sprawling Black Metropolis.44 Even as Harold Washington became the city’s first black mayor, many of the community institutions that had allowed generations of black Chicagoans to enrich their lives were crumbling under the pressures of hypersegregation, chronic unemployment, and suburbanization. It is impossible, therefore, to generalize about the meaning of this history for all black Chicagoans. The standard historical accounts of the city’s black community in the middle of the twentieth century, defined by Arnold Hirsch’s history of “the second ghetto,” have minimized the extent of its community activism. Hirsch revealed the individual and institutional forces that continually recreated racial segregation in the city during a period when there was great potential for integrating African Americans into the opportunities of urban life. It is a tragic and necessary story. And it is a story that demands skepticism regarding narratives of black Chicagoans’ agency. As Hirsch puts it, “Community, resilience, and resistance there may be, but if so, they are pursued and displayed in the virtually unchanged context of residential segregation. That is the first contextual reality.” Hirsch wonders how historians might add black actors to postwar urban history without blaming them for the decline of the city. This is “a complex and nuanced matter that cannot be easily resolved . . . [by] what may become the ritual incantation of ‘agency,’” writes Hirsch. If historians are going to examine African Americans’ influence on the making of the postwar city, he suggests, they must “identify the full panoply of conditioning forces—

introduction

19

both internal and external to the black community.”45 In other words, this history requires a considered balance between what black city dwellers did and what they could and could not have done. Hirsch remains hesitant to hypothesize about the extent or quality of black Americans’ influence on the postwar city. “If, beyond their very numbers and presence, their ability to define the outer parameters of such areas remained limited,” Hirsch asserts, “their determination to refashion the internal ‘givens’ of their world clearly surfaced.”46 My conclusion is that black Chicagoans’ persistence in a long-term fight to reshape a situation not of their own choosing allowed them to create extraordinary, but highly uneven, opportunities, and eventually to replace the city’s oppressive political machine with Chicago’s first attempt at truly democratic progressive governance. Beyond these achievements, worthy of study on their own, the history of everyday people’s activism in black Chicago also provides a case study in the tensions between individual self-interest and collective welfare that run through the history of United States and liberalism more broadly. The subject of this book is the long-term development of black Chicago’s political culture from the 1930s to the 1980s, as seen through local residents’ struggles for individual opportunity and racial advancement. Recently, scholars following historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s theorization of the “Long Civil Rights Movement” have recovered a long black radical tradition in the South and the North stretching back at least into the 1920s. Hall and others have pursued a “long civil rights” perspective in order to counter the sanitized version of the Modern Civil Rights Movement as a struggle for individual rights in a color-blind society. As Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang have explained, in the “long civil rights movement” portrayed by Hall and others, African Americans’ goals have been “more complex and far-reaching than the destruction of petty apartheid, and possessed an ideological and political diversity that transcended liberal thought and nonviolence.”47 My focus on a relatively long period of black Chicago’s history derives from a complementary, but distinct, interest. Namely, I am most curious about why people who were deeply aware of the causes of racial segregation and inequality continued to pursue less than radical approaches to politics. Why did black Chicagoans sustain an extended liberal, neighborhood-based political culture when the limits of black liberalism were made clear again and again as activists and ordinary people uncovered the shortcomings of working across racial lines and with the existing institutions of the city?

20

introduction

Black Chicagoans sustained the long tradition of black liberalism in the context of black Chicago’s unusual combination of exclusion and opportunity between the 1930s and 1980s. The immediacy of the problems people faced in their day-to-day lives reinforced the kinds of strategic pragmatism and individualist notions of progress that were essential to black liberalism. The people I write about knew intimately how largescale economic and political structures excluded African Americans from the full benefits of equality in the city, yet they made the necessary efforts to address individual problems as part of a larger struggle against racial and class exclusion. In addition, unlike African Americans in other locations—especially in the Deep South, where much of the narrative of the long civil rights movement has been centered—significant numbers of black Chicagoans saw at least the possibility of gradual integration into the economic opportunities and political structures of the city throughout the postwar period. From this perspective, it was unlikely that they would risk everything in a truly radical assault on the structures of inequality and segregation. Faith in black Chicago as a place of hope would be tested again and again, both in the limits of individual campaigns for housing, jobs, or political power, and in the realization of the increasing levels of segregation combined with the loss of good working-class jobs over the course of the postwar period. Some black Chicagoans became radicalized and created movements like the labor-civil rights movements of the 1930s and 1940s and the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Even in those periods of relative radicalization, however, the long black liberal tradition never disappeared. In fact, those activists who embraced a more radical and militant politics helped energize and transform the black liberal political culture. Moreover, although activists working within a black liberal tradition often failed to achieve their immediate goals, they succeeded in building a political culture that, against all odds, improved everyday life in black neighborhoods and, in the right context, helped set the stage for the overthrow of the white-dominated Democratic political machine. My contention that black liberalism sustained a critique of the overlapping systems of race, class, and gender inequality runs contrary to the arguments of those who imply that there was a shift from class to racial concerns after World War II. Historian Steven F. Lawson similarly suggests that—contrary to arguments embedded in works by historians such as Glenda Gilmore, Martha Biondi, and Robert Rodgers Korstad, among

introduction

21

others—anticommunism “did not divorce demands of liberal civil rights groups from economic reform.” Cold War anticommunism did force activists to take on “a far more restrained economic agenda, but they continued to link antiracism with economic reform.”48 The opportunities to fight race and class and gender inequalities were not lost entirely; rather, the battles shifted ground as new obstacles arose and black Chicagoans adapted their approaches to the political realities.49 By keeping alive the argument that race, class, and gender inequalities were inextricably connected, they countered the growing insistence on “color-blind” individual fairness throughout the Cold War and the rise of the New Right. And their efforts show that—contrary to conservative revisionist accounts of the modern civil rights movement—“the raceconscious remedies devised in the 1960s and 1970s” were indeed, as Hall argues from a different standpoint, “the handiwork of the authentic civil rights movement.”50 The long tradition of black liberalism brings to the fore actors who are often left out of other narratives, in particular women and working people fighting at the neighborhood level. I find anthropologist John Langston Gwaltney’s description of “core black culture” convincing. Gwaltney’s extensive interviews with black Americans living in the city in the early 1970s point to a “core black culture” defined by “the vast majority of Afro-Americans who are working members of stable families in pursuit of much the same kinds of happiness that preoccupy the rest of American society.” But, for all its similarities to broader American culture, core black culture was also rooted in a dynamic, but particularly black, ethos. “Ethnic solidarity is equated by blacks,” Gwaltney explained, “with civic responsibility.” And blacks developed a changing culture, “building theory on every conceivable level” as they adapted to a difficult world in ways founded upon “values, systems of logic and world view . . . rooted in a lengthy peasant tradition and clandestine theology.”51 I have also been influenced by black Chicago novelist and essayist Leon Forrest, whose novels and nonfiction emphasize the historical and cultural significance of “the striving, respectable, lower middle class . . . full of political savvy, street smarts, eloquence, an unstoppable fury for work, action, achievement, and a keen respect for their elders.”52 Such frameworks for understanding black political culture provide a path beyond questions of agency, resistance, and victimization to see not only that people resisted the everyday destructive forces of life in segregated cities, but also to see what kinds of political culture they created.53

22

introduction

Bettye Collier-Thomas’s monumental study of black women’s history, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice, has provided a model for this kind of work. As John H. Bracey has put it, Collier-Thomas is driven by “empathy and respect for the struggles of poor and working people, and for the difficulties that faced their leaders. She does not exaggerate or romanticize the historical agency of African American women, nor does she minimize it to the point of victimhood. She views class and status categories as ever evolving relationships, and not as things . . . and builds her conclusions on her evidence and not the reverse.”54 What follows is driven by the aspiration, if not always by the capacity, to pursue a similarly empathetic, balanced, and empirical understanding of ordinary people’s long history of black liberalism in Chicago. This ground-level history provides insights into the evolving relationships between black radicalism and black liberalism in Chicago. The radical and liberal strains of the black freedom struggle differed, but they always intertwined in new ways over time. Black Power radicalism offered an alternative to a liberal vision of politics largely bounded by the nation state and focused on individual opportunity. Significantly, however, Black Power understandings of class inequality that crossed racial lines and fostered a Pan-African political consciousness reshaped, but did not displace, black liberalism. Black Power provided a more radical theoretical base for the ongoing development of black liberalism. At the same time, the two strands of the black political tradition had much in common. Black Power’s nationalist impulse and the race-consciousness of the liberal tradition both grew out of pragmatic experiences of racism and the significance of racial solidarity. Black Power changed forever how African Americans approached everything from employment activism and community development to higher education and electoral politics. But to take action against race, class, and gender inequality inevitably required wrestling with the dilemmas of interracial, pragmatic politics. Black Chicago’s political culture was “liberal” because—in different ways in different historical contexts—black Chicagoans emphasized the importance of individual opportunity, persistently appealed to state power as an ally in making change, worked within the existing economic and political structures, and remained willing to make interracial alliances in order to foster the work of racial advancement. It was “black” both because a fluid sense of identification with “black Chicago” remained an essential political inspiration and because black Chicagoans consistently and increasingly advanced a pragmatic politics of black nationalism as a

introduction

23

step toward creating more political power and thus building the base on which to construct a more open city. The evolution of black liberalism was directly related to the development of New Deal liberalism from the 1930s to the 1980s. New Deal liberalism can be defined as a vision of political economy that sought to use the state to equalize income distribution and foster democratic participation, through support of a limited welfare state, organized labor, the expansion of civil rights, and the promotion of the Democratic Party.55 Of course, the New Deal offered black Americans severely limited benefits. And, in part, black liberalism can be seen as belonging to the history of political conflicts over competing claims to the benefits of the New Deal order. Such battles were necessarily related to tensions over who would control the institutions within black communities, and how the tensions between black solidarity and interracial cooperation would play out.56 Given that black Chicagoans overthrew what seemed like an unassailable political machine and, at least for a time, pushed Chicago’s political system in a more democratic direction, their stories represent the groundlevel history of what Nikhil P. Singh has described when he argues that black Americans’ independent black politics have the potential to offer a path to the reconstruction of American democracy.57 This suggestion that there was a progressive black liberalism contradicts critics who point to the tendency of racial liberalism to focus on the symptoms of inequality and its failure to address the root causes of racial inequality.58 Black Chicagoans created a political culture that was at core pragmatic, self-consciously black, and liberal. On the whole black Chicagoans, people with diverse experiences, acted when they had access to institutions that they believed would be productive. Of course, not all institutions were equally effective. And one of the main tasks here is to understand the various effects of different kinds of institutions. But the point remains that black Chicagoans defined their city and their politics by engaging with—rather than rejecting—the institutions and ambitions of urban life. Consequently, the image of the Second Great Migration as an inexorably tragic event that transferred black pathology from the sharecropper’s shack to the high-rise ghetto is no longer tenable. In focusing on the mix of limits and opportunities for black Chicagoans, I join historians such as Davarian Baldwin, Wallace D. Best, Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Adam Green, James N. Gregory, and Annelise Orleck, among others, who have shown that black migrants created vibrant political and cultural worlds in the urban North.59

24

introduction

Chicago has long been a symbol of dreams destroyed by intransigent racism and urban decline. “My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies,” recalled the famous black Chicago novelist Richard Wright of his arrival in the city in the early 1930s.60 Wright’s words seem to haunt scholarly and popular images of black Chicago. “The dreams embodied in the Great Migration,” James R. Grossman concludes in his history of the First Great Migration to Chicago, “eventually collapsed under the weight of continued racial oppression and the failure of industrial capitalism to distribute its prosperity as widely as the migrants had expected.”61 Studies that emphasize the racism and social problems that black migrants found in Chicago and other northern and western cities have allowed us to measure the scale of the tragedy of racial and class inequality in American urban life. How else, as historian Adam Green has recently asked, can we appreciate black Chicago’s value as a cautionary tale, “warning of how societies can degenerate once jobs, education, services and resources are systematically divested[?] How else are we to reckon with the full cost of the cynicism informing the urban social contract today?”62 The tragic dimensions of incomplete and uneven racial progress are undeniable. But I set aside the critique of black liberalism and the limits of black leadership—at least for the time being—to examine what kinds of institutions and lives black Chicagoans actually created. More than anything else I have found a commitment to the values of hard work, community development, family, and religion. Such values have come in for harsh criticism from observers wishing for a more radical attack on racial oppression. But the prevalence of what some might call a “petit bourgeois” culture tells us a great deal about the intensity of the obstacles black Chicagoans faced, as well as the values they brought to their struggles. Because I do not dismiss their efforts, I uncover the commitments black Chicagoans made as they pursued the real, incremental progress and social mobility from generation to generation that requires hard work and institution building, and that is different than, but inseparable from, aspirations for structural transformations demanded by radical politics. In the end, black Chicagoans’ individual ambitions and collective struggles changed history because they created a political culture that achieved significant pragmatic reform while keeping alive a powerful vision of a Black Metropolis that could serve as a base for a long fight to open the city.

chapter one

The Politics of Home in Hard Times

T

he Great Depression hit black Chicago at a particularly important moment. During the 1920s, black Chicagoans had been able to achieve the dream of the Black Metropolis more fully than at any other moment in the city’s history. They had built a black-led Republican political machine that brought patronage power and political influence at the citywide level unheard of in other black communities. They had created formidable black-led business sectors—in banking, insurance, newspapers, and beauty products—which together created an economic elite and made the South Side a magnet for entrepreneurs, artists, intellectuals, and activists. And they had constructed a variety of “parallel” black social and community institutions, ranging from women’s clubs and male fraternities to churches, “Race progress” institutions, sports teams, and the beginnings of a black labor movement.1 The development and growth of black Chicago by the outset of the 1930s could also be seen in its diversity. Divided by class and newcomer– old settler tensions, black Chicago was riven with contests over everything from the best means of political organization to the most appropriate modes of expression that reflected divergent respectable and popular interests in religious practice, music, sports, and the arts.2 The Depression and the political and social tensions of the 1930s together shook the Black Metropolis to its core, revealing the fragility of previous gains and intensifying political and cultural tensions within black communities. In this context of changing economic fortunes and political upheaval, black Chicago’s neighborhoods became important sites of struggle for those seeking to maintain their relatively privileged positions as well as for those who had been excluded from previous political networks. During

26

chapter one

the 1930s, as many historians have shown, black Chicagoans broke from the past to create insurgencies in labor, civil rights, and community-based organizing. They worked with militant and left-leaning organizers in Unemployed Councils, led a fight to establish the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters as the nation’s first independent black union, and played key roles in the building of an interracial union movement in the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Yet there were important continuities in black Chicago’s political culture. Many locals adapted existing institutions to the new context, using churches, social clubs, neighborhood organizations, and electoral politics either to resist the changes in their quality of life, or, also likely, to bring new forms of power to their efforts to improve their immediate situations. In these ways, as the 1930s economic crisis reached into local communities, the era’s political transformations provided new outlets for local people’s efforts to sustain the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Black women in particular played essential, if largely overlooked, roles in this Depression-era “politics of home”—pragmatic struggles against everyday manifestations of race, class, and gender inequalities. These were struggles against external forces impinging upon ordinary people’s lives, as well as contests over who would lead black community-based politics, and for whose interests. Some black women carried relative economic privilege and political influence into the new era, and they generally fought to sustain their status. Others tried to win new influence in local politics by adapting existing neighborhood institutions to the new government, labor, and civil rights allies of the late 1930s. To some observers, they may appear to have acted conservatively in that they were focusing on quality-of-life issues in local contexts. But for these women, the 1930s was a period of political innovation, a time of opening new paths to community welfare. The history of black women’s struggles to ameliorate the effects of the Depression on their families and communities highlights the broad vision of struggles to sustain the “home sphere.”3 This term, introduced by historian Earl Lewis, has provided a way to see that for people acting in their own interests, local struggles to sustain households and neighborhoods could never be disentangled from the wider world of political and economic power. The politics of the home sphere grew directly out of everyday frustrations with, and responses to, the challenges of migration and urban life, frustrations that the Depression only intensified.4 Just as importantly, people acting on their fears and hopes for the vitality of

the politics of home in hard times

27

their families and neighborhoods drew links to political and economic developments in the black community as a whole, and at the citywide and national levels. The forms of activism in the home sphere changed over time and varied according to each woman’s individual social position and ideology. In the particular mix of crisis and opportunity of the 1930s, black women kept the home sphere connected to labor and civil rights struggles. In histories of the 1930s, there has been a tendency to see the rise of maledominated labor and civil rights struggles as having displaced black urban neighborhoods—the “women’s domain”—as the “central terrain” of politics.5 But local women responded to the challenges and new resources of the 1930s in a variety of often unpredictable ways. Rooted in efforts of black migrant women to remake their lives in the city during the early twentieth century, community-based activism both reinforced longstanding forms of social service and took on new directions beginning with the Depression. In the 1920s, according to Victoria Wolcott, women led struggles for social mobility in black urban neighborhoods where “black leaders embraced the opportunity to shape new urban communities by reforming migrants’ dress, demeanor, and deportment.”6 As Wolcott has demonstrated, the limits of such racial uplift became especially apparent during the Depression, and black city dwellers turned to new strategies. “Although bourgeois respectability as a reform strategy never entirely disappeared, economic nationalism and civil rights took precedence during the Great Depression.”7 This may have been true in the sense that black Americans entered labor unions and political battles focused on the economic realm to an unprecedented degree. But the “home sphere” remained central to the political vision of a wide range of black women. Struggles for respectability as a reform strategy not only remained, but they were also reshaped by the new context of the 1930s. Even in the worst days of the Depression, some women managed to hold onto a measure of economic stability in their personal lives and enjoyed deep connections to social clubs, churches, and political institutions that dated to the beginning of the twentieth century. For these relatively privileged residents of black Chicago, the Depression in some ways reinforced their commitment to protecting their positions while giving back through traditional networks of charity. Their responses to the Depression—turning inward to protect themselves and outward to provide charity services to the race—represented key aspects of black political culture throughout the twentieth century, which would become

28

chapter one

even more apparent as social status differences within black urban communities grew after World War II. Other black women often found new ways to seek to improve their quality of life and to promote collective action. Like the women who supported the growth of black trade unions—as members of the auxiliaries of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters or as members of the new industrial union in meatpacking—many black women extended efforts to help their neighbors through churches and social clubs by connecting those organizations with the rapidly growing and changing government institutions of New Deal Chicago.8 Building upon older forms of community politics, they responded to new challenges of unemployment and neighborhood decline in ways that connected institutions based in churches to new government institutions. Women in late-1930s black Chicago created diverse forms of self-help and political action that mixed what historian Darlene Clark Hine calls “domestic feminism” with economic nationalism and, in some cases, labor and civil rights organizing and electoral politics. Their previously unnoted stories reveal the complexities of women’s “work as makers of community.”9 The real benefit of following the stories of such women is not just that they reveal individual agency and creativity but also that they hold lessons for understanding the everyday development of black Chicago’s political culture. Black women seeking to protect the privileges they had won in the early decades of the twentieth century, along with other women who had lost virtually everything during the Depression and turned to new forms of political action, all shared in the creation of a variety of expressions of community-based politics. What they all shared was a generally pragmatic interest in the quality of life in local communities, as well as a fundamentally liberal belief in the importance of government institutions in ensuring individual opportunity.

The Old Elite in Hard Times When newcomers arrived in Chicago in 1930 they would have found a major black urban community of nearly 234,000 people with welldeveloped social status differences (map 1). At the time, many members of the World War I–era black elite who had established their homes in the 1900s and 1910s struggled to hold onto their neighborhoods in the Douglas Community Area on the Near South Side. Embodying the political and social networks that had transformed black Chicago between 1900

0

0.1

0.5

1

Miles

0% Non-white

1 - 80% Non-white 81 - 100% Non-white

LA

2

KE

6

MIC

HI

To Downtown

GA N

4 5 8 1 - Near South Side 2 - Douglas 3 - N. Kenwood-Oakland 4 - Grand Boulevard 5 - Washington Park 6 - Armour Square 7 - Fuller Park 8 - Englewood 9 - West Woodlawn

9

map 1. The South Side Black Metropolis, 1939, with nine majority-black Community Areas identified. (Map created by Jason B. Wallace, based on the 1939 Land Use Survey of Chicago.)

30

chapter one

and 1930, they used their positions to protect their own quality of life and to give back to the larger community. As they passed out of the vanguard of political leadership, they held onto an older style of community activity. In the late 1930s, Eliza Chilton Johnson, an old settler par excellence, lived alone in a two-story frame house at 3650 South Prairie Avenue that she had bought with her husband. The Johnsons were the first African Americans to move into the blocks between 35th and 37th on Prairie. Eliza was born in Oxford, Mississippi, and finished the eighth grade at a boarding school in Holly Springs, Mississippi. After moving to Chicago in 1907, she married Colonel James Henry Johnson, a master brick mason who had served in the celebrated Eighth Regiment in the Spanish– American War. She became a leading light in Chicago’s social club scene. “I have been a great lodge lady,” she declared, “I am an Eastern Star, a member of the Louise D. Marshall Auxiliary Illinois National Guard, Day Nursery Club for Children, Phillis Wheatley Home Club, John R. Tanner Camp Auxiliary, Prairie Avenue Neighborhood Club, and a few others.” Women like Johnson set the standard for black Chicago’s rich tradition of activity in voluntary organizations.10 Black brick masons generally did not have access to steady work, yet somehow Eliza and her husband made a comfortable life. She was proud of her status, acted the part of the socialite, and held attitudes about class and color to match. When an interviewer asked her about an attractive plant stand in her living room, Johnson said that it belonged to a white friend of hers who had lived in the neighborhood when she arrived. “I have quite a few good white friends,” she continued. “I am not against people on account of the color of their skin, but I am against people when they are not in my class. I have certain standards and I stick to them.” Johnson’s color-blindness, however, did not necessarily extend to other members of the race. Johnson felt badly for her friend Essie Arnold because Arnold had never married. Reflecting the longstanding history of “color prejudice” within African American communities, Johnson said, “Every time the child started to get married something was wrong. If she liked the fellow and he liked her, he was either too dark, or if he was light enough, he didn’t have any money, or he was not a thoroughbred.” Unlike her bold statement about her class affinities, however, Johnson was embarrassed talking about color distinctions. When she noticed the interviewer taking notes on her anecdote about Arnold, Johnson said, “Don’t write this down.”11 The 1930s had been tough on Eliza Johnson and her neighborhood. Colonel Johnson had passed away, and even before his death, the John-

the politics of home in hard times

31

sons had lost almost all of their savings. They suffered from one of the defining scandals of Depression-era black Chicago, the collapse of the blackowned Binga Bank. “I wouldn’t be broke now,” she told an interviewer, “but my husband was a stockholder for the Binga Bank.” Jesse Binga was one of the most prominent of the post-1900 generation of black Chicago business leaders. Born in Detroit in 1865, Binga came to Chicago in 1893 as a railroad porter and invested his money in real estate, infamously gouging his renters for ten to fifteen dollars more per month than white renters had been paying for the same kinds of apartments. Binga was a celebrated race leader as he pushed for middle-class blacks’ access to white neighborhoods and became a famous target of the violence aimed at black “pioneers” in all-white neighborhoods between 1917 and 1921. At the end of the 1920s, Binga’s star looked bright, but his real estate and banking empire came crashing down in 1930 during an early Depressionera run on the bank he had founded in 1908. Binga lost his five-story Arcade building on the 3600 block of State Street that included office space, a dance hall, and his bank. In 1931, Binga was convicted of embezzling $300,000 from the bank and sentenced to one-to-ten years in prison. The Black Metropolis took Binga’s fall hard, for he had come to represent the fragile foundation on which much of it was built. The Johnsons had difficulty recovering from the loss of their savings. “Of course,” Johnson said, “you know that we [black investors] get nothing until everybody else is taken care of.”12 Alone and broke, Johnson regretted the concessions she had to make to remain in her house. She began taking in a boarder, and, although she needed the money, she “never reconciled herself to the fact that she is not able to have her own home to herself.”13 The surrounding neighborhood also began to change. While neighboring blocks continued to have higher rates of owner occupancy, better housing conditions, and fewer subdivided apartments than most blocks in the Douglas Community Area, the 3600 South block of Prairie experienced a major influx of newcomers and numerous housing conversions. This nineteenth-century settler lived on the same block as tenants who generally moved every one to two years. Blocks with ten or more converted residential structures sat alongside blocks with zero or one converted building. On Johnson’s block 218 of 328 dwelling units needed major repairs, or were unfit for use. In contrast, on the block across the street from Johnson, only fourteen of 270 units were in major disrepair, and two nearby blocks contained no significantly deteriorated units. Moreover, only twenty-seven of 328 units on Johnson’s block were owner occupied (maps 2 and 3).14

0

5-9

5-9

0

5-9

1

5-9

0

5-9

0

10+

0

10+

10+

10+

10+

Johnson

4 10+

10+

4

5-9

Neighbors 3

10+

5-9

10+

10+

10+ Wright

0% Non-white 1 - 80% Non-white 81 - 100% Non-white map 2. Race percentages and numbers of housing conversions per block in 1939 in the Douglas neighborhood where Eliza Chilton Johnson, Bertha Neighbors, and Lucille Wright lived. This neighborhood was located inside the nearly entirely black communities of Chicago’s South Side. For a map of racial percentages on the broader South Side in 1939, see page 29. (Map created by Jason B. Wallace, based on the 1939 Land Use Survey of Chicago.)

G

H

H

G

H

A

G

F

Johnson

A

C

B

C

B

N/A

F

B

D

B

D

G

A

E

B

Neighbors

C F

B

B Wright

0% Non-white

A - 0%

E - 30-39.9%

B - 1-9.9%

F - 40-59.9%

C - 10-19.9%

G - 60-79.9%

D - 20-29.9%

H - 80-100%

1 - 80% Non-white 81 - 100% Non-white

map 3. Race percentages and housing conditions in 1939 in the neighborhood where Eliza Chilton Johnson, Bertha Neighbors, and Lucille Wright lived. Letters correspond to the percentage of dwelling units in residential structures in need of major repairs or unfit for use. This neighborhood was located inside the nearly entirely black communities of Chicago’s South Side. For a map of racial percentages on the broader South Side in 1939, see page 29. (Map created by Jason B. Wallace, based on the 1939 Land Use Survey of Chicago.)

34

chapter one

Johnson feared the decline of her general area but still strongly identified with the two or three blocks immediately surrounding her house. “You hear people say this is a bad neighborhood. It isn’t at all,” Johnson reflected. “You see, the neighborhood club has done a good job in helping to keep the neighborhood clean and to keep prostitutes off the street here in these two blocks between 35th and 37th Streets on Prairie.”15 The neighborhood, as she defined it, remained a bulwark against further decline and an inspiration to stay involved in the neighborhood club and the local club world. Living just down the street from Johnson, Bertha and George Neighbors felt fortunate to be free from the trials most of their fellow black Chicagoans faced. The Neighbors belonged to the generation that gained a foothold in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s. Born in Cave City, Kentucky, Bertha Neighbors (née Hart) grew up in Louisville and moved to Chicago in 1913. Three years later she married her hometown sweetheart, and in 1918 they moved into a three-story house at 3811 South Giles (a.k.a. Forest) Avenue, which they were still paying off in 1938. Bertha’s great grandmother, Jennie Fortune, was “one of the pioneer residents of this city,” and lived with the Neighbors until her death in June 1938.16 George was born in Elizabeth, Kentucky, and the two met while attending high school in Louisville. He finished two years of college with photography training. In the 1910s, he was a photographer for the Defender and by the 1930s had a successful in-home studio.17 Having built a comfortable home for themselves insulated by the relative stability of their local community, the Neighbors felt more pity than antagonism for others nearby facing tougher times. “I feel that the crowded conditions under which people live cause more crime than anything else,” Bertha noted. “If we get rid of some of the overcrowded conditions in various neighborhoods, we will get rid of some of the delinquency.” Neighbors was thankful her daughter did not have to go down the paths many other young women followed. “I wouldn’t want my daughter to work in a policy station,” Neighbors declared, referring to the apartments, barbershops, and other sites where people playing policy—an illegal gambling enterprise similar to a privately run lottery—placed their bets. She recognized such jobs provided much-needed opportunities for the “many girls who . . . make between fifteen and twenty-five dollars a week and . . . seem to be satisfied with their jobs.” Other black Chicagoans’ children had to take such jobs because the alternatives were much worse—unemployment or low-wage, difficult domestic work or unskilled

the politics of home in hard times

35

hard labor—while hers went to college, studied the arts, and found steady work. Her son was a chiropodist and her daughter worked in a “flower factory in the Loop.” Neighbors was not satisfied; for her daughter “isn’t working in her field now and I hope soon she will get back to her own interests in music.”18 Clearly, hard times did not cause Neighbors to give up her aspirations for social mobility. Bertha Neighbors’ aspirations for her children went along with both a race- and class-based politics. Between 1913 and the late 1940s, Neighbors was a member and officer of the prestigious Clover Leaf Charity and Social Club, raising money to, as she put it, do “some things for others.” She supported the respectable National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but she rejected mass-based political organizations. “The Garvey movement,” she scoffed, “is pretty poor.”19 Drake and Cayton may have overstated the case when they argued that “Garveyism was never very popular in Chicago,” and that “by 1938, Bronzeville had almost forgot Garvey and Black Zionism,” but clearly the appeal for Garveyism was far from universal.20 Neighbors reserved her harshest judgment for “these storefront churches. . . . As long as we have them we know that we still have any number of illiterate people.” Both the Garveyite nationalist movement and storefront churches upset Neighbors’ sense of class-based leadership. She respected the longtime Republican Party leader Oscar DePriest “because he is a gentleman,” but Neighbors did not “approve of ignorant leaders. I am interested in social needs of people, but if I were a beggar I wouldn’t go to another beggar and ask for help.”21 The Neighbors’ neighbors, Lucille and Ed “the Iron Master” Wright, had been instrumental in the formation of black Chicago’s most powerful institutions during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Lucille was a prominent social club and neighborhood leader, while Ed Wright, “the first powerful Negro politician,” became Chicago’s first African American ward committeeman in 1920.22 As committeeman, Wright controlled access to patronage and slated candidates on the ward’s Republican tickets. Wright helped Oscar DePriest, Robert R. Jackson, Louis B. Anderson (who lived on the Wrights’ block), Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and others build the first black Republican political machine. The Wrights helped establish Unity Hall (3140 South Indiana Avenue), as one of the most important political institutions in black Chicago. Unity Hall began as a prominent Jewish Social Club, and in the 1910s Chicago telephone magnate Samuel Insull, so the story went, turned the building over to Chicago’s black elite, who used it as a base from which to build the city’s

36

chapter one

fig. 2. Looking south from 3800 South Calumet Avenue. On the left side of the photograph, note the modern buildings that replaced the housing that was deteriorating when Lucille Wright and the “old aristocrats” were living in the housing still standing on the right side of the image. The Wrights’ house was the second one in from the corner on the far end of the right side. (Photograph by author.)

first African American political machine. Together, Wright, DePriest, and Wells and her Alpha Suffrage Club, among others, organized the voting bloc behind the black Republican power in Chicago’s Second Ward.23 The Wrights lived on one of Douglas’s premier blocks, at 3844 South Calumet Avenue, where, Lucille Wright said in 1938, “the old aristocrats reside on the west side of the block” (fig. 2).24 On the right side of the photograph below stand the houses where Wright and the “aristocrats” resided, while the left side of the image shows a good number of much more modern buildings, replacements for buildings that were deteriorating quickly in the 1930s and were ultimately destroyed by the city. Although her neighborhood was changing, Wright felt secure because she measured her “neighborhood” in extremely local terms. “This neighborhood,” by which she meant her side of her street, “has changed very little in the last few years. In fact, I think it is just about the same,” she recalled. “The families in this block are old families and they make a special effort to keep their neighborhood up to par. Most of the people in this block have servants, some have had several servants and the economic conditions have brought them down a button or two and they maybe keep one servant now instead of two or three.”25 Of the eighty-nine units on Wright’s block in 1939, thirty-four percent were owner occupied—a large percentage for black Chicago—and the median duration of occupancy

the politics of home in hard times

37

in owner-occupied units was twenty years or more. Moreover, only five of the eighty-nine units on Wright’s block were in need of major repair or unfit for use. Renters paid a relatively high average monthly rent of $33.40. Adjacent blocks had similar percentages of owner-occupied units, stability of owners, mobility of tenants, conversions, and roomers. As a sign of the tough times, however, even on Wright’s block ten or more residential structures had been converted into multi-family occupancy; five or more dwelling units had three or more roomers; and the median duration of tenant occupancy on the immediately surrounding blocks was shorter than the city average.26 After her husband died in 1930, Lucille Wright retreated from the public eye, but she remained active in charity work through her many social clubs. “It is all right to be in the limelight,” she said, “but I rather appreciate living a quiet life as I am now living.” She was obviously comfortable. She had a “chauffeur” who had been with her for eleven years, “and he does practically everything for me.” She had grown accustomed to such luxury. “I have always had comfort and convenience, and I suppose that has been a source of happiness to me,” she confided to the interviewer. Wright also remained active in charity work. She was an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary of the George S. Giles Post 37 of the American Legion, and until her death served as a “social and civic leader” through the Metropolitan Community Church.27 In the 1930s, elite black Chicagoans like Johnson, Neighbors, and Wright attempted to maintain the privileges they had won during the 1920s, while sustaining a model of social club charity that was also an expression of class privilege. By the late 1930s, members of the old elite were dying, or their power and wealth were beginning to pass away. Nonetheless, their emphasis on local political and social networks, forged in precinct-level fights for political power and the networking required to build small businesses, lived on.

Church-Based Social Service Meets the New Deal The generation of middle- and working-class black women who came to Chicago during and after World War I shared the old elite’s commitment to their local communities, but many also sought more immediate change in the basic institutional structure of the Black Metropolis. Whether they were working through formal political organizations, block clubs,

38

chapter one

churches, or other community institutions, many black women argued that conditions in their local communities during the Depression demanded significant new resources and organizing to improve the home sphere. Most of these women did not find an institutional base through the industrial union or civil rights movements. Instead, they found allies and a base for action in their churches, in neighborhood-based organizations of the unemployed, and in growing networks of local and state-level political agencies. Through these decentralized community institutions, workingand middle-class black women engaged in the politics of home, seeking both the traditional patronage of urban political machines and new resources then invested in cities by the New Deal. African American women in Chicago spoke about their neighborhoods with a deep ambivalence. They mixed a keen perception of decline with a persistent sense of pride and a hope that black Chicago could provide a base for a better life for themselves and African Americans more generally. “Since the Depression all kinds of people have come in,” Mary Frazier informed an interviewer. Frazier and her husband came to Chicago from Michigan in 1920 because, she told an interviewer, “We like to live in the city.” Her husband had been working in the Illinois Central Railroad shop for twelve years. In recent years she felt her neighborhood had “gone down, both in principle as well as value.”28 Another South Sider who had arrived in the city in the 1920s, Johnnie Ward, was even more pointed. “I have lived as far north as 30th Street and south to 35th Street,” she declared in 1937. “I would like to move farther south. I am rather tired of this community. The place is going from bad to worse.” Ward was openly disgusted with her neighbors. “I am tired of it all. I hate this place,” she declared.29 While arguing that “a year-round clean-up campaign” could do “some good,” Alberta Mayes Burns revealed the kind of social tensions that intensified in Depression-era black Chicago. “Many Negroes are just born lazy,” Burns declared. Burns was a middle-class urban southerner who came to the North with connections just after World War I, and managed to maintain her comparatively comfortable life in Chicago. She was born in Mobile, Alabama, raised in New Orleans, and arrived in Chicago with her son and daughter in 1920, eight years after her husband had died. She joined her parents in Chicago and bought a three-story greystone at 3308 South Calumet Avenue across the street from her parents, who owned the place at 3319 South Calumet.30 “The way Negroes have damaged the property [in Chicago] is a sin and a shame.” She could “easily understand why the residents in the Chicago University [sic] neighbor-

the politics of home in hard times

39

hood don’t want [black neighbors] over there [because] the ways these beautiful apartments have been torn up into kitchenettes is a shame.”31 The Depression destabilized the lives of all black Chicagoans, and clearly helped intensify social tensions in their local communities. Despite their frustrations, however, women like Frazier, Ward, and Burns continued to fight for their neighborhoods by maintaining their homes and by working through churches, unions, social clubs, and government agencies to improve the quality of life in their communities. Many black women took the everyday difficulties of life in the Depression as an inspiration to work on behalf of their families and local communities in ways that created networks between their church-based social services, social lives, and home lives. For Mary Frazier, her community concerns and her interest in keeping up domestic spaces were one and the same thing. Frazier’s house was “about the best looking one on the block,” with freshly painted blue windows and new venetian blinds, and Frazier’s beautification efforts extended beyond her own home. She was organizing a group of women to collect signatures on petitions protesting “the slum conditions that the city had allowed to accumulate in this neighborhood.” As a member of the “Progressive Club” at Olivet Baptist Church, she advised her neighbors on housework. “We talk to them about how to improve their homes,” Frazier said matter-of-factly. “If we meet with a good response, we show them how to fix their furniture . . . keep their curtains clean, as well as their windows.” Frazier found that homeowners “will respond better than renters,” but she suggested that the problem was not merely that renters did not care about their environment. Instead, most renters “have large families and they can’t afford to spend money fixing up a place and then the rent goes up and they have to move.”32 Frazier continued to promote respectability as a reform strategy, but, significantly, she understood the limits of such efforts in terms of structural forces impinging upon individuals’ lives, rather than merely the consequences of personal failings. This is evidence of the broader vision of even the most conservative forms of the politics of home. Johnnie Ward also worked through her church to promote the quality of life in her neighborhood. She had moved to Chicago with her husband Ivelly Ward in 1922, when he got a job at Wilson Packing Company. With his steady work in the packinghouse, they carved out a stable life for themselves in the city, living in the same flat at 3131 South Calumet Avenue for ten years. In December 1937, according to an interviewer,

40

chapter one

“Mrs. Ward’s living room was the last word in style. She had all new modernistic furniture. The room looked very beautiful as it was decorated for Christmas. She had a tree already decorated and the bells hung from the windows.”33 But for Ward the threats to her comfortable style of life were all too apparent. “Now, take that house next door,” she told the interviewer. “Why, for three years people lived over there who were the nastiest folks I have ever seen. The building was condemned and they didn’t have to pay any rent so they just lived there like pigs or dogs. The water was cut off. The man who had the garage in the back used to let them come over there and get water.” Like Frazier, though, Ward did not merely give up on her neighbors. She became a member of the Deaconess Board at Pilgrim Baptist Church. “It is a big help to any community where a church is. . . . That is what holds up this community.”34 Alberta Mayes Burns socialized and helped her neighbors as a member of the Pastor’s Aid at Olivet Baptist Church and as secretary of the Calumet Neighborhood Club. Organized in 1920, the Club put on an annual Christmas party and a summer picnic, gave flowers to families who had lost a relative, and “help[ed] do things for the underprivileged in the neighborhood.”35 In the late 1930s, Burns found a new ally in Alderman William L. Dawson just as he was switching to the Democratic Party. As a longtime Republican, Burns’s alliance with Dawson demonstrated how the promise of incremental improvements in neighborhood life helped facilitate the dramatic shift of black voters’ allegiance from the Republican to Democratic Parties.36 Dawson, who led the black “submachine” as alderman and congressman until the 1960s, won Burns’s favor by helping to improve the neighborhood. He arranged for vacant lots in the area to be fenced in so that younger children would have a place to play when the older kids could not escort them to the park. He also ensured that the streets in the community were repaved. Burns saw such efforts as an achievement of effective local organizing. “Our neighborhood club usually writes letters asking for what we want. The policemen and Mr. Dawson have cooperated with us in practically everything that we have tried to do.” If such everyday aldermanic influence on behalf of the neighborhood was not enough, Burns believed that “the Democrats were about to give [her daughter] a job.” Thirty-one-years old, Burns’s daughter had a job as a stenographer, and had just started working “on the polls” for Dawson. “She is responsible,” Burns said flatly, “for about thirteen votes in my father’s home and here in our home so I suppose she should have some consideration.” Burns felt that Dawson provided real benefits for

the politics of home in hard times

41

her and her family. If there was a problem in the neighborhood, either the political machine or the neighborhood club could solve it.37 In retrospect, Burns’s faith in Dawson’s ability to solve her neighborhood’s problems seems misplaced. Black Chicagoans’ accommodation to the political machine—their willingness to trade votes and political loyalty for patronage—has been seen as one of the principal indicators of black Chicago’s relatively conservative political culture. Yet it is important to recognize that in the 1930s turning to Dawson for help could be both old-school accommodationist patronage politics and, at the same time, feed into a new effort to bring an unprecedented level of government resources to black urban communities. The Second Ward, home to all the women discussed here, “moved glacially into the New Deal coalition” as the Republican loyalties to the Party of Lincoln and the Chicago networks forged by people like Wright and DePriest “persisted well into the 1940s.”38 Voting for, and claiming patronage from, the first black politicians to jump to Democratic tickets represented a break from the past, not an accommodation to established networks of power. Trading votes for relief from the New Deal shared much in common with the votes-for-favors politics that typified the post–World War II black political machine and that allowed black Chicago politicians like Dawson to keep their seats without attacking racism head-on. But engaging the New Deal at the local level also represented a pragmatic attempt to use state power to the advantage of ordinary people often shut out from the benefits of government. To do so was to overcome the widespread disillusionment with politicians in general, as expressed by Mrs. Henry Mae Mitchell. A domestic worker since she arrived as a twelve-year-old from Birmingham, Alabama, in 1919, Mitchell declared, “Politics control everything, and the big men control politics to their advantage.”39 The limits of machine politics were nothing new in the 1930s. Women who overcame such discouragement often did so by working through their existing community institutions to demand their share of New Deal programs. Community-based activism could turn even longtime bastions of Republican power into “New Deal Republican” institutions.40 One of black Chicago’s oldest and most prominent Protestant churches—Olivet Baptist Church at 31st Street and South Parkway—was a traditionally Republican church. William E. King was the most powerful Republican in black Chicago by the mid-1930s, and he had strong ties to Olivet, “serving as personal attorney to Olivet’s Rev. L. K. Williams.”41 Notwithstanding King’s continued influence, Olivet members—many

42

chapter one

of whom had suffered greatly from the economic downturn—used the church as a base to organize their neighbors to bring the benefits of the New Deal to their local communities. Georgia Lawson was one of the most prominent women who pursued this small “d” democratic effort to fight neighborhood decline through the Republican stronghold of Olivet Baptist Church. There she found her opening into local politics. Lawson stood out as “a great leader . . . with plenty of nerve” among Douglas residents.42 Lawson connected the networks of Baptist social service to a new world of government agencies initiated during the New Deal. In many ways, she foreshadowed the efforts of later generations of black women in public housing and welfare rights activism to use their community-based networks to build a collective voice with which to demand improvements in the quality of life in their local neighborhoods.43 Lawson had fallen hard during the Depression but used her experiences as an inspiration for political action. “I had money when I came [to Chicago],” Lawson said, “[I] had a large rooming house, but I lost our life savings in the bank . . . and I am too old to ever accumulate anything.” In May 1938, she lived with her children in a small basement apartment at the rear of 3246 South Prairie Avenue. Lawson lived in an area where “most of the houses . . . are dilapidated, and the streets need to be repaired. Rubbish of all kinds was scattered all over the place. Window panes were broken out.”44 Sixty-four of 148 units on Lawson’s block were in need of major repairs or unfit for use, while on the block just to the east only twenty-eight of 105 units had deteriorated to such a degree.45 Lawson kept her furniture “simple” because she had to move often. Nothing in Lawson’s life seemed stable. She had only “a brown metal bed, two chairs, one rocker, a trunk, and a small round table”—because, as Lawson said, “they keep us moving all the while.”46 Lawson did not just accept these conditions, and she was not content with appealing to her alderman or neighborhood club to improve the situation. A member of Olivet Baptist Church, she was also president of the Citizens Non-Partisan Organization (CNO). Founded in June 1936, the CNO grew within two years to include eight to nine hundred members cooperating with a much broader network of activists who worked to keep relief stations open in the neighborhood, obtain old age pensions to their elderly neighbors, lower rents, limit landlords’ power of eviction, “increase food budgets” for the unemployed, and bring more WPA jobs in the area.47 Although officially nonpartisan, Lawson identified as a Republican and built her networks through Olivet Baptist Church.48

the politics of home in hard times

43

Lawson found a generally enthusiastic audience, when, in an October 1937 meeting at Olivet Baptist Church, she described a recent trip to the Illinois State House in Springfield, where she had lobbied for improved New Deal benefits. “We have gotten some results,” she began, but she said the people should not be satisfied. “I believe we can march in a mass here and get more results,” she declared. “It takes a mass coming together to do anything worthwhile.” Lawson implored her neighbors to do more than just survive. “I think the trouble with most of us is that we are afraid to die fighting for the things that we need and should have. . . . The most of us just make ourselves satisfied just to exist.” Lawson wanted to keep moving forward, but she found others in the group were not so ready to rock the boat. A Mr. Horton replied immediately when Lawson finished her speech, “I think it would be a good idea if we would begin with taking our many troubles to our alderman.” Horton’s call to appeal to the ordinary channels of patronage politics was not received well. Most of the people who showed up on that rainy October night in 1937 were inspired by Lawson’s message to do something more. Sixty-one-year-old Betty Clay, who lived at 3316 South Wabash Avenue—where only five of the 174 dwelling units were occupied by owners, and ninety were in need of major repairs or unfit for use—told the crowd, “I am really suffering . . . I am not in very good health, but yet I am willing to march or do anything that might help the conditions” in the neighborhood. With her poor health in mind, Clay prompted her neighbors to get in the streets and demand better services in the community. “I would just as soon die marching as any other way,” she said, “if the end will help someone, I will not have died in vain.”49 Another “old lady” named “Mrs. Justice” declared, “This is a very terrible time, I can’t help it because I am old and can’t work. I believe there will have to be bloodshed before we can get the results we want.”50 In such desperate times, community leaders like Lawson, and many of their neighbors, remained committed to fixing their local problems by pressuring government officials to make significant changes. Oldschool appeals to the alderman just did not seem to cut it, when the stakes were so high and when access to new kinds of resources from the New Deal seemed to offer so much. Though the limits of the political machine as an ally were clear, local people saw the New Deal as promising substantial change for the home sphere, if people would fight for it. Significantly, this activist mindset did not necessarily have to be inspired by the left-leaning activists who generally get the credit for kick-starting more militant forms of community organizing in 1930s Chicago. Lawson, for example, drew motivation more

44

chapter one

from her personal experiences with poverty and unfair relief policies than from radical organizing groups like the Socialist Illinois Workers Alliance and the Communist Unemployed Councils.51 When a WPA interviewer asked what she thought of the Communist Party, Lawson replied, “I know very little about them.”52 It is conceivable that Lawson was feigning ignorance, although it seems unlikely because she confused the Socialist unemployed organization with the Communist Party in her discussions with Davidson. Lawson worked mainly through Olivet Church to focus on the issues that would bring substantive improvement for her and her neighbors. But she did so in ways that went well beyond older styles of church-based racial uplift. She led a protest, for example, when the South Side Merchants Cooperative attempted to get city and state governments to end cash benefits for relief because, the merchants claimed, clients “were throwing their money away buying whiskey instead of food.” In reality, Lawson objected, the “merchants on the South Side were getting fat off of the relief clients and giving them things no one else wanted to buy.” If anything, she felt, the government needed to get more cash in the hands of the poor. In April 1938, the Citizens’ Non-partisan Organization raised enough money to send Lawson as a delegate to Governor Henry Horner’s office in Springfield, Illinois. Lawson recalled that she reminded the governor that he said he “wouldn’t let anybody starve, well I am about to starve.” And, she told him, she paid eleven of the fifteen dollars she received every month on rent. “How can I have anything much left for food?”53 Lawson pressured the governor to address her local problems, a very different tactic from charity-based relief work. Still, Lawson and the CNO represented an outgrowth of, rather than a fundamental break from, Olivet’s enduring institutional commitment to fighting “social ills” by serving people in need while also fostering political unity across racial lines. Over the course of the post–World War II decades, Olivet Baptist Church increasingly came to be seen as a conservative force in the black community. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Olivet pastor Reverend J. H. Jackson condemned the fight to desegregate the Chicago Public Schools as unnecessary rabble rousing. Jackson also famously objected to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as an “outside agitator” when King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Chicago to energize the school desegregation fight and to cooperate with a broad group of Chicago activist and civic organizations in the Chicago Freedom Movement to “end slums.” Jackson’s political

the politics of home in hard times

45

influence was immense, as the head of the National Baptist Convention (NBC). With upwards of six million members in 1953, the NBC was the largest black church organization in the world. For his resistance to the civil rights struggles in the South and in Chicago, Jackson has earned a reputation for tragic, deep-seated conservatism.54 Such a vision of Baptist social service, as historian Wallace Best has pointed out, later clashed with King’s vision of using the Baptist church as an “institutional basis for the Civil Rights Movement.” Best’s argument corrects an understanding of the clash between Jackson and King as a conflict between conservatism and radicalism. Instead, Best argues convincingly, “Their conflict was essentially religious in nature and was predicated on questions regarding what constituted church work among black Baptists. In retaining control of the NBC, Jackson wanted to make sure that the answers to those questions would reflect what he perceived to be the ‘vital center’ of American culture.”55 Olivet’s connection to the CNO was part of the institutional commitment to solving social ills—defined in extremely local terms— through Baptist church work. Lawson’s story focuses attention on a different political narrative, one that coexisted with this later, largely male debate over the political role of the Baptist Church. Like the women who supported the growth of black trade unions, black women like Lawson extended efforts to help their neighbors by connecting their churches and social clubs with the rapidly growing government institutions of New Deal Chicago. Building upon older forms of community politics, they responded to challenges of unemployment and neighborhood decline in new ways that anticipated postwar forms of women’s activism, such as public housing tenant councils, welfare rights organizations, block clubs, and feminist labor and civil rights organizations. In this way, Lawson and the CNO reveal how local responses to neighborhood decline helped set precedents for important political patterns in the postwar period.

Constructing a Political Culture in the “Home Sphere” The history of black women’s politics of home during the hard times of the 1930s illustrate that traditions of community-based self-help and individual striving were always intertwined with efforts to forge more aggressive political strategies. The old black elite in Douglas like Eliza Chilton Johnson, Bertha Neighbors, and Lucille Wright had carved out

46

chapter one

positions of relative privilege for themselves by the 1930s using the political and religious institutions of early black Chicago. And they used those same institutions—social clubs, neighborhood clubs, and the Republican political machine—to protect their positions. Yet they also sustained a model of charity and community work that remained important in the face of substantial transformations of black politics during and after World War II. If Johnson, Neighbors, and Wright represented the past, then Alberta Mayes Burns and Georgia Lawson represented key parts of the future. They directed their demands for resources to help their communities to the emerging Democratic political machine and the growing federal government. These examples point to the various ways black women’s leadership roles in local communities shaped twentieth-century urban political culture. They must be seen, in part, as one step in the transformation of black community politics from the racial uplift of the Progressive Era to the “homeowner politics” of the late twentieth century. Self-help, community development, and racial uplift were conservative political approaches that best served the interests of middle-class and elite African Americans, often without addressing the issues most important to the working poor and unemployed.56 But their efforts must also be seen as the progenitors of the admittedly problematic ways black Chicagoans engaged with organized labor, the local political machine, church work, and other voluntary organizations, as well as the federal government, to get the resources they needed to improve their own lives and the prospects of their local community in a segregated city. The politics of home were not necessarily distractions from larger battles over labor and civil rights—they were intertwined in changing ways as black Chicago’s political culture evolved. Women’s community-based activism in the 1930s helped to sustain the dream of the Black Metropolis in a time of crisis. As was the case throughout the century, their work grew out of pragmatic concerns for everyday quality of life in neighborhoods challenged by the Depression and a deep commitment to their local communities. As Mary Frazier put it, she and her neighbors “believed in the Black Belt.”57 Such pride inspired community-centered activism. But the forms of community-based activism underwent important evolutions. Acting upon the dream of the Black Metropolis, they sustained traditional forms of neighborhood uplift politics that have proven to be extremely durable. But in a new context, some women connected their efforts to a new black Democratic organization, a growing federal government, and even protest politics.

the politics of home in hard times

47

During the 1930s, women struggling to meet the challenges of the Great Depression acted through their personal and community networks, while also taking advantage of the opportunities to demand resources from the New Deal and to align with rising working-class militancy. In their efforts, black women in local communities sustained the energy that would keep alive the long-term drive for a better quality of life and more equal access to the opportunities of the city. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, women took on leadership roles in the embattled labor civil rights movement—with the packinghouse union at the center—and they led neighborhood uplift efforts and joined movements for independent black political power. Black women’s politics, like progressive politics generally, remained relatively narrow in the 1950s and early 1960s, limited by the dominance of a nonconfrontational mode of race relations politics, anticommunist repression, and the power of the Democratic political machine in Chicago. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, black women drew upon and contributed to the quickening energy of the Black Power era—they demanded resources from the federal government’s Great Society programs and pushed neighborhood organizations to connect to the broader movement for community control and black political power. All of these eras saw a new kind of politics of home with different dynamics of class, gender, and race. What they all shared was a pragmatic interest in the quality of life in local communities, as well as a fundamentally liberal belief in the importance of voluntary and government institutions in ensuring individual opportunity and community welfare.

chapter two

Community Development in an Age of Protest, 1935–40

S

am Parks rose through the ranks of black packinghouse workers on Chicago’s South Side to become one of the most militant union leaders at the Wilson and Company packing plant. He embraced the Congress of Industrial Organization’s (CIO) cause after seeing that the workplace in Chicago could be just as racially oppressive as those in the South. Supervisors, Parks recalled, “treated people in that Wilson plant just like I happened to see when I was living in the South in Memphis as a kid, the way I saw white people treat workers down there.” Frustrated that Chicago did not live up to its promises of freedom, Parks also found that the city provided a new outlet to act on his grievances. “I figured, hell, this is Chicago, this is supposed to be the home of freedom, ain’t no white man got no business doing no Negroes that way up here.”1 Having escaped the Jim Crow South, workers like Parks found new forces limited opportunity in the North, and many joined a widespread, interracial rebellion that built the United States’ industrial union movement in the late 1930s. Militant struggles to transform industrial work in the city transformed the broader politics of race, class, and gender and opened up new kinds of power for existing community-based organizations. The interracial union drive in the city’s packinghouses has been one of the most celebrated movements of late 1930s. Chicago’s packinghouse workers built and maintained a union grounded in shop floor militancy that reached out into community-based activism. After unsuccessful attempts to organize black and white workers in the packinghouses in 1904 and again during World War I, a new movement in the 1930s created the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, which led to an inter-

community development in an age of protest

49

racial and exceptionally powerful union, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). By the end of World War II black workers comprised approximately 40 percent of the workforce in meatpacking.2 They brought to the union expectations for equality that helped sustain rank and file militancy. The UPWA’s Anti-Discrimination Committee battled racist employment and housing practices, while lobbying against southern disfranchisement and agitating for a permanent Fair Employment Practice Committee.3 Black workers in Chicago’s packinghouses gained seniority, job security, upward mobility, and even benefits like maternity leave and community welfare programs. Such remarkable improvements in the everyday lives of black workers required the sustained efforts of one of the most militant and independent unions in the nation’s history. The UPWA was one of many driving forces in the thriving world of black activism in the late 1930s and 1940s, when a new generation of labor and civil rights leaders emerged in black Chicago.4 This “New Crowd” developed an aggressive style of protest politics organized to address economic grievances.5 Early in the 1930s, they joined in unemployed activism, pushing for protections from eviction and pressing for government aid to the unemployed. The New Crowd also gained traction in building the first mass black union movements. They formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first independent African American union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and they played integral parts in the organization of interracial industrial unions in meatpacking and steel. The New Crowd also helped make the late 1930s a period of political “cross-fertilization” as protest groups “challenged traditional institutions” such as the Chicago Urban League, the Chicago chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Chicago Council of Negro Organizations (CCNO), and various church and voluntary organizations “to be more accountable to the interests of the working class.”6 The new protest politics pushed the broader political world of black Chicago to the left by bringing masses of working-class blacks into organizations that used street protests and labor pickets— or at least the effective threat of such protests—to demand greater economic equality. Just as important, and less well understood, is how collaborations across ideological and political lines transformed efforts to develop individual opportunities and the community institutions of the Black Metropolis. Most black workers in Chicago did not benefit from the advocacy of

50

chapter two

a militant union like the UPWA. But they had many other potential allies in the civil rights organizations and communities of the South Side. Together, the local chapter of the NAACP, the CCNO, the Chicago Urban League, the local chapter of the National Negro Congress, as well as the many activist-minded churches sustained a vibrant and diverse world of grassroots activists and “Race Leaders.”7 Groups built upon distinct ideological and political foundations interacted with each other in ways characteristic of the ongoing evolution of pragmatic black liberalism. The broad mix of black political movements in late 1930s Chicago must also be seen as essential to the long-term evolution of community development politics in the Black Metropolis. There are important echoes here of the history of black women’s politics of home in the 1930s, when many women found new allies in unions, the rising Democratic machine, and the growing federal government. With such a strange mix of potential allies, black women furthered their existing efforts to promote the welfare of their communities. Similarly, long-established, largely male-led civil rights organizations and networks of skilled black workers and black professionals found new opportunities for collaboration. In addition, this history prefigures the political dynamics of later eras of political change—especially in the 1960s and 1970s— when rising civil rights activism and the Black Power movement brought new urgency, and new sources of power and influence, to existing community organizations. In each era, the collaboration of existing civic, community, and labor groups infused black politics with new creativity. It also reinforced the widely shared commitment to community welfare, self-help, racial solidarity, and engagement with the state. Three groups of black Chicagoans focused on community development politics took advantage of the rise of industrial unionism, Popular Front alliances, and the growing federal government during the late 1930s. Like the many largely female-led community-based efforts to improve the quality of life in black Chicago, these groups advanced less militant, but no less important, programs. First, college-educated young men with ties to William L. Dawson’s rising political star built professional careers as they revitalized the use of consumer boycotts in order to pressure white-owned businesses to hire black employees. The boycott movement was directly linked to a second group I call the black craft economy. The members of the black craft economy were a diverse lot, including construction workers, entrepreneurs, wholesalers and retailers, as well as lawyers and real estate speculators. They were loosely aligned around a shared interest in

community development in an age of protest

51

fostering black businesses and opening jobs for black workers in the craft economy. My characterization of black skilled workers as part of a black craft economy draws upon historian Andrew Wender Cohen’s revisionist history of the white craft economy. Cohen describes the white-dominated urban “craft economy” as “the self-made men, skilled workers, idealists, and scoundrels” who fought the modernization of Chicago’s economy from 1900 to 1940. In a wide-ranging argument, Cohen shows how the protectors of the craft economy—a diverse, hustling group of building trades workers, shopkeepers, realtors, and teamsters—used physical violence, craft governance systems, and connections to municipal governments “to determine who might buy, sell, and work in the city.”8 And, thirdly, in the late 1930s civic leaders and individuals striving for opportunity in the craft economy collaborated with longstanding social work and moderate civil rights groups aligned with the CCNO. The concrete gains these groups made might have been limited—and their commitment to moderate politics and self-promotion might seem questionable in retrospect—but they undeniably helped strengthen a broad commitment to liberal pragmatism during the “turbulent years” of the late 1930s.9 The transformation of black politics in the late 1930s created black Chicago’s version of the New Deal order, in which a Democratic political organization found a base among voters interested in patronage, government services, and labor and civil rights. A wide variety of people and groups used this base of activism in the late 1930s to reenergize the movement for jobs for skilled black construction trades workers; to push boycott movements for jobs for black men and women in retail, wholesale, semiskilled manufacturing, and white-collar work; and to add a new twist to the work of organizations like the Chicago Urban League which sought to build connections with influential black and white individuals in local and national government and business organizations. During the second half of the 1930s, black activists in these arenas of electoral, labor, and social work politics acted with greater unity. Such unity was possible in part because by the late 1930s the labor-based civil rights movement, the New Crowd, made it “respectable to support a demonstration or a boycott in the struggle for Negro rights.”10 But the unity of competing leaders also took shape because they rallied around a widely shared inspiration for race consciousness—a belief that the Depression had interrupted the drive to build a viable black metropolis and that shared racial grievances could form the basis for unified political action around community development. Of course, these bases for community

52

chapter two

action failed to give rise to a truly independent black city within a city in the succeeding decades. Nonetheless, out of the instability and energy of the late 1930s emerged a relatively unified movement for black community development in the short-term, and—for good and bad—the roots of enduring forces in the city’s politics, not least of which was the man who would become the head of the city’s black political machine, William L. Dawson.

William L. Dawson and the New Political Base for Community Activism The Great Depression and the New Deal created great political instability in black Chicago. At the same time that the economic crisis brought the black elite “down a peg or two,” weakening their claim to community leadership, a new generation of highly ambitious black men and women, many of whom were college-educated, came of age.11 They intended to become the core of a new leadership class and ended up becoming key players in an increasingly heterogeneous network of black communities. As the New Deal challenged the Republican Party’s hold on voters in Chicago’s black wards, new Democrats arose who built on the mass activism of the time. William L. Dawson, more than anyone else, benefited from the political disorder in late-1930s black Chicago. Dawson graduated magna cum laude from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, arrived in Chicago in 1912 and entered Kent School of Law in 1915. He volunteered for World War I, and, after receiving an honorable discharge in June 1918, completed a law degree at Northwestern University in 1920.12 Dawson had returned from World War I committed to spreading the idea that African Americans could use the power of the vote to break down the kind of racial inequality he had experienced in the South and in the segregated military. In the 1920s, therefore, he used his law degree to build connections as a precinct worker in the burgeoning Republican machine led by Ed “the Iron Master” Wright and Oscar DePriest.13 Contrary to popular perception, there was no wholesale shift in black Chicago from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party in the late 1930s. Indeed, the Party of Lincoln continued to exert considerable influence in black Chicago well into the postwar period. Nonetheless, in 1936 and thereafter, black Chicagoans voted for President Franklin D. Roose-

community development in an age of protest

53

velt and national Democratic candidates in unprecedented numbers. Many voters in low-income wards also began to vote for candidates who could promise to bring home the benefits of the growing state. Black politicians who remained in the Republican Party essentially transformed themselves into “New Deal Republicans,” using their influence in the City Council, Cook County government, and the Illinois legislature to bring the benefits of government programs back to their local communities.14 New Deal Republicans also had the luxury of going up against a highly unpopular Democrat in Arthur W. Mitchell, who had failed to use his position in the U.S. House of Representatives to attack racial issues or to bring material benefits to the black neighborhoods of Chicago. At the same time that black Republicans were connecting with the issues of daily life, extending New Deal benefits, and fighting for civil rights, the main black Democrat, Mitchell, made his way to Congress largely on the strength of the support he garnered from white patrons in the Democratic machine and the white voters they delivered. “All of this sounds paradoxical,” black newspaper and real estate magnate Claude A. Barnett wrote in 1939, “but all of it is true. Mitchell is not liked in the very district which sends him to Congress. The common people do not come in contact with him.”15 Not so for the Republicans who survived precisely because they connected with ordinary people. The Depression and the New Deal, therefore, combined to create a situation in which party loyalties were up for grabs in a way they had never been before and in which there was an eager group of young black leaders ready to experiment in order to take advantage of new avenues of access to government power. As early as 1935, Dawson—still a Republican—had begun to forge a new political path by remaining in the Republican Party while also breaking with William E. King, the most powerful black Republican of the time. Dawson championed initiatives to bring public housing to black Chicago, while he supported efforts to protect tenants’ rights and to use boycotts to open jobs to black workers. Dawson retained his ties to the black electorate while creating what would become an extremely fruitful relationship with Democratic Mayor Edward Kelly. In doing so, he won the Republican nomination for Second Ward Alderman in 1938 and then joined Corneal A. Davis and C. C. Wimbish in their effort to construct a black Democratic organization. Dawson ultimately took control of the local black Democratic Party machine—and prevailed over rivals such as Earl B. Dickerson—by proving that he could bring concrete benefits to ordinary people without being overly militant and alienating powerful

54

chapter two

white politicians. He thus created a model of black political leadership he used to hold onto his support among the masses of black voters while frustrating those who hoped that having a black man in Congress would mean bringing “race” issues to the floor of the House of Representatives. Dawson has come to stand for the subservience of black electoral leaders to their white patrons, but his historical significance is not as straightforward as it might seem. For many observers, Dawson epitomizes the kind of clientage politics that put black men in office at the federal, the state, county, and local levels, but that also failed to provide effective leadership for a truly progressive antiracist agenda. Yet as historian Christopher Manning has argued, to see Dawson only in light of the latter years of his career, when Mayor Richard J. Daley undercut Dawson’s influence by distributing power in the black wards among the “Silent Six” black aldermen, is to ignore Dawson’s important legacy as a political party builder.16 Moreover, as historian Charles Branham pointed out long ago, Dawson’s early career was instrumental in the construction of a vibrant and diverse political scene in 1930s and 1940s black Chicago. His rise “cannot be understood apart from the multiplicity of anxious, aggressive, and increasingly militant protest groups which undermined the political hegemony of established black Republican leadership within the black community.”17 The emphasis here ought to be on the “multiplicity” of groups seeking new paths to secure access to political power, jobs, housing, and improvements in the general quality of life in black Chicago. Out of all of this activity in the late 1930s, black Chicagoans created a wide variety of overlapping forms of organization and activism. Dawson capitalized on this surge of activism to build support just before he switched to the Democratic Party.18 By 1935, Dawson hitched his career to a “general program of community revitalization.” He worked closely with Joseph Jefferson, a rising young South Side community leader. Jefferson was the Boys’ Work Secretary of the Wabash YMCA and helped Dawson form the Consolidated Tenants Association, which won notoriety in battling increasing rents and saving tenants from eviction. By April 1937, Jefferson could pack the City Council “with angry blacks” and successfully pressure Mayor Kelly to form a committee to investigate housing issues—with Alderman Dawson at the head.19 Dawson did not last long in the protest arena. The political scientist James Q. Wilson described a split in Dawson’s career. While first building political support in the 1920s and 1930s, Dawson “was a well-known street-corner speaker with a magnetic personality . . . outside the ma-

community development in an age of protest

55

chine.” But after 1942, when he joined the Kelly-Nash Democratic Party machine, Dawson remained an “organizer” rather than a charismatic ideological leader, and he focused on “tangible, material” incentives to maintain his following. But “on the race question,” he was “moderate,” and, in fact, avoided racial issues as much as possible.20 Nonetheless, Dawson’s rise in the late 1930s opened space for other black Chicagoans to use militant direct action to win benefits such as jobs and black-owned businesses. Dawson transformed himself from a community activist into a new power player in the black Republican Party organization in the 1920s and early 1930s, and remade himself again into the leader of the city’s first black Democratic Party organization by the late 1930s. He did so by engaging with the issues most important to the masses of black Chicagoans: housing, jobs, and the quality of life in black neighborhoods. Along the way, Dawson helped create the Negro Labor Relations League (NLRL), which used consumer boycotts and other pressure tactics to force employers to hire black workers in retail, wholesale, and white-collar jobs in black neighborhoods. Dawson soon broke with the NLRL, concluding that the limits of militancy outweighed the benefits. Thereafter, he focused on holding onto his own power and building the black organization within the Democratic Party. His vision of black electoral leadership as primarily focused on party building displaced the desire to use black Chicagoans’ growing electoral clout to attack racial issues head-on. Dawson’s most direct legacy for protest politics came in the form of the NLRL, which used direct action militancy for the less than radical goal of providing relatively skilled and well-connected black residents with openings into the city’s economy.

Boycott Politics and Economic Nationalism In September 1938 the Chicago Defender criticized established black organizations for failing to fight more militantly for jobs. “There are approximately 20,000 legitimate jobs which could be secured from the industrial plants and public utilities had the Urban League and the Council of Negro Organizations put forward a systematic drive in that direction,” the Defender declared. Chicago paled in comparison to the black communities of Cleveland, New York City, and St. Louis, “which are solving the labor problems of their black constituents.”21 Three years later, Defender editor John Sengstacke still rued the relative lack of use of economic

56

chapter two

boycotts in Chicago, although he saw hope because the St. Louis Urban League, the Harlem Coordinating Committee for Employment, and Chicago’s NLRL “were learning to use the vast hidden economic power they have to whip into line those companies” that did not hire black workers.22 Formed in 1937 out of the alliances Dawson helped build among college-educated black men on the rise in the Consolidated Tenants Association, the NLRL brought a model of economic nationalism back to popularity in Chicago. Boycott efforts in Chicago and other major black urban communities had been popular earlier in the 1930s. But they faded after business owners began securing court injunctions, effectively banning consumer picket lines. The 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act sanctioned picketing in legal labor disputes, but lower court and appellate court judges decided that protests against racially discriminatory hiring practices were not legal labor disputes. Such protests, however, were finally approved by the Supreme Court’s decision in New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co. (1938). Justice Owen J. Roberts expanded the definition of a legal labor dispute to include cases in which the disputes “arise with respect to discrimination in terms and conditions of employment based upon differences of race or color.”23 In the wake of the 1938 decision, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns sprang up again in Harlem, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. The NLRL’s renewed activism—built on the model of the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the early 1930s—was part of this resurgence.24 The NLRL pursued an agenda of aggressive economic nationalism. The group acted on a longstanding commitment to race conscious job campaigns as a method of community development. With roots in the black middle class, the League’s leaders presented themselves as the advocates of “the rank and file of the people.”25 This meant that, like Dawson, League leaders primarily fought for immediate, pragmatic economic victories. Key figures in the League like Joseph Jefferson and Rev. M. Earle Sardon were associates of Alderman Dawson. Jefferson and Sardon worked together in youth recreation programs at the Wabash YMCA. Jefferson and Dawson were fellow law students at Northwestern University. And Sardon served as a precinct captain in the Second Ward under Dawson. Other League leaders included Everett J. Hill, owner of Hill Brothers Realty Company, and Teamsters’ Union member Balm L. Leavell Jr. All of the League’s leaders had migrated to Chicago during the World War I era, except for Leavell, who arrived in 1931. None of the League’s leaders could be con-

community development in an age of protest

57

sidered political radicals; they were, in fact, at the forefront of what remained of Chicago’s black Republican Party loyalists. Although Dawson broke his ties to the League when he joined the Democratic Party in 1942, Sardon and Hill remained active Republicans, repeatedly running losing campaigns for local and state office in overwhelmingly Democratic districts.26 Like the spoils of Dawson’s black political sub-machine, the greatest share of the benefits of the League’s work went to the people plugged into the League’s social, political, religious, and business networks. By the time Jefferson helped found the NLRL in 1937, he was a popular bachelor in his late twenties. In 1936 and 1940 the Chicago Defender identified Jefferson as one of Bronzeville’s most eligible singles. He studied law at Northwestern and Loyola Universities and secured a position with the Chicago Urban League during the Depression. Jefferson was, according to the Defender, “tall, smooth, and polished; raved over by the ladies. Boys’ work secretary of the Wabash Y. Unattached at present. Plans to summer in Europe, and, if properly urged might make it a twosome. Likes the ladies.” He did not mind, the Defender told its readers, “If someone calls him ‘swingster de luxe,’” but he “isn’t forever talking about it.” This swinging bachelor held some traditional ideas about men and women’s roles. “Though he feels it is not strictly modern,” the Defender mused in a glowing portrait, “Mr. Jefferson cherishes the idea of husbands supporting their wives, and doesn’t believe women should work after they are married. If they do, he says, homes as well as husbands are apt to rise up in protest.”27 Jefferson and the other men he worked with saw themselves as the public defenders of the home sphere. It is difficult to say why Jefferson—a comfortable member of the middle-class black social world and a staff member at the Chicago Urban League and the Wabash YMCA—became involved in activism. In part, he might have been moved to a more active race consciousness by his trip to the 1936 Olympics in Germany, where Jesse Owens famously embarrassed Adolf Hitler.28 Upon his return, Jefferson became an active member of the movement to secure public housing for black Chicagoans.29 In early 1938, as the executive director of the Consolidated Tenants Association, Jefferson sent a formal complaint to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, demanding that the federal government ensure black Chicagoans would have access to federal housing projects in the city.30 As an Urban League official in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he sponsored youth activities in Washington Park, while he also pressured the Illinois Senate to redress discrimination against black employees and inmates of

58

chapter two

the St. Charles School and Home for Boys, and he lobbied municipal authorities to begin construction on an addition to the South Side DuSable High School.31 Although the Urban League explicitly opposed direct action techniques, Jefferson proposed “that DuSable high school students should be encouraged to strike until the congested condition there is relieved.”32 Whatever the initial spark, Jefferson gradually built a career as a protest-minded “race leader.” On the issue of access to jobs for black men and women, League leaders were as rhetorically aggressive as any activists in black Chicago. In 1940, Jefferson, Hill, and Leavell founded The Crusader, which served as the NLRL’s voice. Through The Crusader, League members articulated a politics of economic nationalism and protest seeking to use the resources of the local political machine and the federal government to redress past and present discrimination. “If a disproportionate share of Race members are wards of the government, if an increasing number are stretching forth their hands for government aid and assistance,” Jefferson wrote in a 1939 letter to the Chicago Defender, “is it because they are lazy, is it because they are unwilling to work, is it because they do not possess the requisites for employment—or is it because they are black?” Jefferson answered, “Since the day that we landed on the shores of this continent, we have been workers,” and as fellow workers black Chicagoans ought to join together to confront employers and unions that “exclude us primarily because of color.”33 Jefferson clearly saw how race and class oppression overlapped. Inspired by a political vision that combined a clear understanding of racial and class exclusion with a focus on securing individual opportunities for employment, the NLRL spent three decades fighting job campaigns for African American men and women. In 1937, Jefferson and Chicago Urban League Industrial Department Director Howard Gould secured the promotion of newspaper carriers at The Chicago Herald Examiner to branch manager positions.34 The next year the League gained much more public attention when it successfully pressured the AFL’s Moving Picture Machine Operators Union to license black workers, and it forced many South Side theaters to hire black operators.35 The League built on its movie theater victories to organize a campaign to secure jobs for black men as delivery-driver salesmen for local dairy companies. In 1941, after a more than two-year fight, the NLRL forced Bowman Dairy to hire black workers, and by 1946 the president of the Milk Wagon Drivers’ Union could report to the Mayors’ Commission on Human Relations that the

community development in an age of protest

59

previously lily-white union had 150 black members despite “opposition to the introduction of more Negro workers in the barns.”36 Along with the Chicago Defender, the Chicago and Northern District Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and the Chicago branch of the Civil Liberties Union (which filed a complaint with the FEPC in 1943), the League helped push Illinois Bell Telephone Company to admit black workers to installer, repair, and collector jobs during the war, as well as operators positions in 1947.37 These were piecemeal but not inconsequential gains. For example, in May 1939, Illinois Bell employed thirty-four African Americans, out of a total of 23,866 workers. By December 1943, the company had hired over four thousand additional employees, but still employed only 128 black workers.38 Whatever the scale of their gains, the NLRL won plenty of enemies. Almost immediately after its founding, the NLRL became a controversial presence in the city’s often rough world of white-dominated, and gangconnected, craft unions and wholesale and retail enterprises. In Black Metropolis St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton included the NLRL among the “race radicals” in black Chicago who used “demonstrations, boycotts, and very limited cooperation with ‘white allies,’” as well as “squeeze plays and isolated, sporadic acts of violence” to open jobs for “the race.”39 The white-led South Side Merchants Association demanded that the Illinois State Attorney and Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly investigate the boycottoriented organizations. “This district,” the merchants claimed, without any hint of their own complicity in unsavory dealings, “seems to be fertile field for rackets, [and] the legitimate businessmen are being threatened, annoyed, boycotted, and otherwise disturbed by irresponsible persons.”40 Opening jobs for black workers in this craft economy required a different, no less hard-nosed, style of organizing and activism than in the industrial unions that have received much more attention. League leaders forced their way into the networks of policy kings, politicians, labor unions, and businesses that ran much of the Black Metropolis. Jefferson, for instance, built a liquor distribution company and a base of power in middle-class black society. He may have been an emerging socialite, but he saw himself as a tough-minded, up-and-coming entrepreneur and civic leader. In 1939, Jefferson clashed with J. Levirt “St. Louis” Kelly. Allegedly connected to Al Capone’s Chicago “Outfit” in the early 1930s, Kelly was one of the most popular and colorful figures in Bronzeville throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. Black waiters, bartenders, cooks, and grocery workers all praised Kelly for improving their

60

chapter two

working conditions. As one black Chicagoan wrote to the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, for the Bartenders, Waiters, Waitresses, and Cooks Union, Local 444, and the Retail Clerks International Protective Association, Local 901-B, Kelly’s work meant that “instead of working 90 hours a week for $5 and tips, these people now enjoy salaries ranging from $20 to $45 per week, get a day off, work fewer hours, cannot be fired at will, and no longer [are] stigmatized by feeling a flunky complex.”41 One of Chicago’s most enduring black activists, Timuel Black, benefited from Kelly’s early organizing, and seven decades later remembered Kelly’s example as teaching him the value of organization. “I could even talk back to the boss and feel protected if I felt something wasn’t right,” Black recalled of the benefits of Kelly’s union victories.42 But Kelly also had a reputation as “one of the biggest racketeers in the country” and “the Outfit’s longtime black face in Bronzeville’s Negro labor unions.” His gangland-style demise did not end the rumors. Kelly was shot and killed by Wendell “Cateye” Lyons in April 1944.43 These were the kinds of men the NLRL faced in their employment activism. Indeed, it was not long before Jefferson had a run-in with Kelly. In January 1939, Jefferson had Kelly arrested for allegedly assaulting him during the NLRL’s campaign to integrate Chicago’s dairy companies. Kelly had attempted to undercut the League’s campaign by calling on merchants to stop buying milk from the two South Side dairies that employed black drivers, and Jefferson went to the union’s offices on the 4600 block of South Parkway to protest. It remains unclear what occurred, but Jefferson claimed that Kelly attacked him, and through his lawyer—none other than Alderman Dawson—he swore out a warrant against Kelly. Tension built when Kelly appeared at the 48th Street police station. As Kelly emerged from the station, “a near riot” broke out as “several hundred followers of Jefferson rushed Kelly” and the police had to break up the crowd.44 By clashing with Kelly, Jefferson announced his arrival as a player in the roughand-tumble game of job competition in the wholesale trade. The League made enemies wherever they went. In part, the antagonism grew out of its tactics of street protests and boycotts. Whether or not a particular picket line sparked a clash, the threat of a violent confrontation between picketers and business owners always hung in the air. In at least one case tensions on the picket line pitted the police against League protestors and bystanders who came to the League’s defense. On a Saturday night in October 1938, fifteen picketers circled in front of the busy Michigan Theater at 47th Street and South Parkway when some-

community development in an age of protest

61

one grabbed a picket sign from League member Arthur Jenkins. Jenkins quickly ran after the man, retrieved his sign, and “returned to his post.” But the confrontation attracted a great deal of attention on the corner “jammed with people.” The tension increased when a police officer placed a call for at least twenty-five officers to respond to a “riot” at the scene. The Defender reported that “a woman volunteer picket, Mrs. Junior Thomas . . . was manhandled and threatened with clubs” by the police. Thomas and at least two bystanders were arrested.45 One anonymous woman wrote a letter to the Chicago Defender accusing the League of recruiting “boys who lived in and out of jail” for their picket lines.46 Picket lines attracted negative attention from authorities and the self-consciously respectable public alike. The League did not plead innocence, claiming instead that the ends justified the means. “We were unable to get respectable boys to walk the lines,” Jefferson wrote in the Defender. “These delinquents were the only Negro youth who had enough race pride and courage to fight for jobs for Negro men. Which is more important the securing of jobs or the means of getting the jobs?” After suggesting that the League’s critic “check the financial records of her church . . . [where] she might find that emissaries of the devil make it possible for her to sing ‘I’ll get there one of these mornings,’” Jefferson then gave a candid assessment of the League’s work. “The NLRL is not a character building or a reforming organization. We leave that for the Urban League, the Y’s, the settlement houses, and other welfare organizations, all of which have received one or more checks from a policy baron or a so-called racketeer during the past year.” In a city where the religious institutions, social workers, and philanthropists all had connections to corruption, Jefferson claimed, the League’s tactics were well justified in a fight “for Negro rights.” And he reminded his critics, “The Bible says, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’”47 The League proudly claimed a “Chicago-style” employment activism was necessary if any real gains were to be made. The history of the NLRL and employment boycotts provides something other than an easily usable past. Led by people who were clearly aware of the forces of race and class exclusion that kept black workers from gaining their full measure of opportunity, the League also included more than its share of self-serving and perhaps less than savory characters. But the struggle for jobs in Chicago did not occur in a vacuum. And it is instructive to see how a real possibility that job gains in skilled work could be won sustained a hard-nosed economic nationalism that always

62

chapter two

overlapped with an essentially entrepreneurial and individualistic vision of employment politics. The lines between middle-class racial individualism, pugnacious working-class striving for opportunity, and race-conscious economic nationalism blur. Moreover, the potential benefits such activism could bring to individuals like Jefferson and his fellow NLRL members helps explain why they continued their work for decades, despite the reality that boycotts were only marginally effective. In all these ways, the League’s history sheds light on the much longer arc of the politics of economic nationalism, a politics that would flourish again in the late 1960s and 1970s and, in doing so, raise many of the same kinds of questions the NLRL’s work raised in the 1930s and 1940s.48

Tuskegee, the African Blood Brotherhood, and the Federal Government Another unexpected source of activism, and in some cases even left-wing radicalism, took shape among skilled black building trades workers in the 1920s and 1930s. The construction trades had been a source of great economic and community power for European immigrants to Chicago. Racial discrimination, however, largely blocked this path for African Americans. Nonetheless, skilled black trades workers and their allies persistently struggled to break down the barriers. And they had unprecedented success in the late 1930s, when the construction trades became a site of protest politics cross-fertilized with more traditional and politically moderate efforts to secure individual opportunity as both an end in itself and as a part of a broader project of community development. Three people especially stand out in the history of efforts to win jobs for skilled black trades workers—J. Edgar “Duke” Hodges, Lovelyn J. Evans, and Edward L. Doty. Hodges and Evans were the kind of skilled workers and elite black activists who generally go unnoticed in the literature on black migration and urban black activism, largely because they were embedded in the networks of skilled black workers looking out for their special interests in the craft economy. Building trades workers and their allies, like Hodges and Evans, belonged to the same fraternal orders, social clubs, and political campaigns that welcomed Chicago’s black entrepreneurial and economic elite. They socialized and did business with black housing subcontractors (many of whom were trades workers themselves). And they used their social connections and work skills to win per-

community development in an age of protest

63

sonal economic security and to try to “lift the race.” Edward L. Doty came from a different wing of the black craft economy, one closely linked with the radical trade union movement. Doty was the founder of the American Consolidated Trades Council (ACTC) and the head of the Chicago branch of the communist African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). Founded in Harlem in 1919 by Cyril Briggs, the ABB’s core activists were largely West Indian immigrants who brought a nationalist radicalism with them to the city. In Chicago, Doty connected the ABB with militant Southern-born black trades workers determined to break a path into construction trades unions. In different ways, Hodges, Evans, and Doty all helped break down the racial barriers blocking black workers from union jobs in the construction trades, although the gains were limited and slow in coming.49 Hodges was the son of a prominent bricklayer in Memphis, Tennessee. From his family, Hodges had the benefit of elite social networks, as well as examples of political engagement. His family ranked among the respectable classes in Memphis, and his older relatives even had connections to Ida B. Wells, the famous anti-lynching activist who left the city for Chicago.50 Bricklaying was also a family inheritance; Hodges learned the trade from his father and brought his mason’s skills with him to Chicago, where he and his mother Georgia H. Hodges moved in 1917.51 Soon after he arrived in Chicago, Hodges began to build networks with business leaders and tradesmen in black Chicago. In 1924, for example, he was one of three servers for a banquet thrown by the Associated Business Club for the head of Tuskegee Institute, Robert R. Moton. While carrying trays of food for the banquet, Hodges met not only Moton but also local leaders such as Defender editor Robert Abbott, banker Jesse Binga, congressman Oscar DePriest, and many others.52 Hodges’ ability to foster networks manifested itself again in 1928, when he won a $1,600 Elcar Sedan in a Chicago Defender subscription contest. Hodges beat dozens of other contestants and secured the second highest number of subscriptions for the Defender in a competition sponsored by the paper itself.53 Hodges nurtured these relationships as an active member of the city’s social club scene.54 As he was waiting tables and developing relationships with Chicago’s black elite, he was also working as a nonunion bricklayer.55 In 1929, the Chicago Bricklayers’ Union Local 21 licensed him, and in 1931 he cofounded the Brotherhood Club of Black Bricklayers.56 One year after founding the Club, Hodges’ unique position in black society and the construction trades was apparent when he was asked to lay the cornerstone

64

chapter two

for the highly prized development of Provident Hospital, which would employ a black medical staff and serve a black clientele.57 The formation of the Brotherhood Club signaled individual black bricklayers’ aspirations for craft-based security. The Club was also an indication that black Chicagoans would pursue the time-tested strategy of using male skilled work to gain a foothold in the city. In Chicago, this seemed possible primarily because individual workers built growing networks within the city, as well as with fellow tradesmen across the country and, eventually, in federal government agencies during World War II. The Brotherhood Club consisted entirely of AFL union members, except for one woman (Lovelyn J. Evans). The first meetings of the Brotherhood Club took place in a South Side barbershop, bringing together various levels of the black craft economy—trades unions, construction trades, and service trades— in one place.58 Hodges edited the Brotherhood Digest, the Club’s monthly journal. The Digest focused primarily on Chicago but also included articles and letters from bricklayers and contractors in other northern and southern cities. Through the Digest, bricklayers shared information about jobs and kept tabs on friends and co-workers who had spread to cities in the North and the South. The Brotherhood Club was an exemplary black craft economy institution—an organization that fostered networks and respectability to individuals because of their craft. Club members socialized together, helped out when another member had a job on his own house, and joined in cooperative efforts to win jobs for black masons.59 The members were generally prominent in Chicago’s black social club scene, leaders of the local black trade unions, and active in municipal politics, and many held relatively high-status alternative jobs. Club President Prince A. Glanton was a parole officer, grand master of Grand Lodge 9 of the Grand United Order of the Odd Fellows, and a political activist who, in the never-ending pursuit to ensure that locals (rather than patrons of a white machine) would hold influence over community politics, campaigned against such luminaries Oscar DePriest, William E. King, William L. Dawson, C. C. Wimbish, and Ralph Metcalfe.60 Glanton was also president of the Blackhawk Construction Company, which had rebuilt churches, lodge halls, and taverns, while also taking smaller jobs such as barbecue pits in black neighborhoods on the South Side.61 Lovelyn J. Evans, whom Hodges described as “Chicago’s leading woman crusader in getting Negroes jobs,” carried traditional notions of

community development in an age of protest

65

racial uplift into employment activism through the Depression and World War II and into the postwar decades.62 Born in 1895 into one of Chicago’s classic “old settler” families, Evans became a prominent social club leader and a committed employment activist on the South Side. Her father, Joseph Miller, moved to Chicago in 1888 from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, settled on the North Side, and built the successful Miller Buena Park Fireproof Warehouse Moving Company. “My mother was strictly a German,” Evans said, “and my father was a Negro, but with some Indian in him.” Although “they had very few friends” and their families were unhappy with the marriage, the couple “never had any trouble.” They stayed on the North Side, moving from a one-story home behind the company’s barns at Halsted Street and Bradley Place to a larger apartment at Grace and Evanston Avenues, and, finally, to a seven-room apartment at 4015 North Broadway Avenue. Evans later remembered being part of a small group of black Chicagoans on the far North Side, where students at Lake View High School and Northwestern University mingled. She recalled admiring Northwestern student Earl B. Dickerson, who would go on to become a prominent lawyer, entrepreneur, alderman, and a leader in the Chicago Urban League and a member of the national board of the NAACP. The “informal fraternity” forged in the 1910s by students like Dickerson, Evans, and others (including William Dawson) paid dividends during the 1930s and 1940s.63 As an adult, Evans “began to want to see somebody looking like me,” and moved from the virtually all-white North Side to the black South Side, becoming one of the leading members of her social class. After she had moved to the South Side she immersed herself in the social club scene and civic leadership. She mixed with South Side elites, including the prominent physician Dr. George Cleveland Hall, minister and alderman Archibald Carey, and real estate mogul Jesse Binga. “We were called the privileged nigger class,” she remembered.64 Evans was on the board of the Women’s City Club of Chicago for twenty-two years, and active in the Neighborhood Improvement Association, the Chicago and Northern District of Federated Women’s Clubs, and the woman’s board of Provident Hospital.65 As early as 1930, the Pittsburgh Courier called Evans “one of the most important factors in the civic, social, and club life of Chicago. . . . Presiding over her home at 4932 St. Lawrence Avenue.”66 In the 1930s and 1940s, Evans was also a leader in the local Parent Teacher Association, a colonel in the Salvation Army, secretary of the South Side Boys Club Auxiliary, a staff writer for the Chicago Whip (the paper that began the first

66

chapter two

“Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns in the city), and a youth recreation organizer for the Chicago Urban League, working with Joseph Jefferson. Her husband John W. Evans worked for Illinois Bell Telephone for forty-five years. Their two sons went on to solidly middle-class jobs— John W. Evans Jr. worked for the Veterans Administration and Joseph M. Evans became assistant manager of the integrated, middle-class, privately funded housing development, Lake Meadows.67 Privileged to have choices, Evans took black Chicago as her home and dedicated herself to a life of race-conscious community-based activism. A lifelong Republican, Evans rejected radical politics but remained committed to civil rights, economic development, and racial uplift. “I thought Marcus Garvey was nuts. . . . And W. E. B. Du Bois . . . When I read he was embracing Communism, I dropped him. Paul Robeson was a fine man. I was so sorry he went to Russia.”68 But she did not reject politics per se. In 1936, she worked as traveling secretary for Mary C. Booze, the only female National Committee Chair for the GOP.69 In June 1937, Evans was one of five black Chicagoans selected to go to Washington, D.C., to lobby for President Roosevelt’s support for a federal anti-lynching bill.70 Later that year, she worked with the NAACP to support Carl A. Hansberry’s suit against restrictive covenants.71 She served on Hansberry’s “committee on strategy . . . to supervise presentation of the issues of the fight to the community.”72 In 1940, she led the League’s drive against juvenile delinquency, coordinating the efforts of Urban League officials, the New Deal’s National Youth Administration, other social welfare agencies, and local business leaders. Together, these groups pursued a classic Urban League agenda, combining pragmatic efforts to remove “bad influences” from children’s lives and to provide more supervision of youth activities. They attempted to close liquor stores, shorten tavern hours, and prevent “loafing of undesirables in drug stores and other places frequented by women.” They sought the “suppression of rowdyism, especially in public places,” enforcement of gambling laws and closure of policy wheels, the supervision of dance halls and provisions for “earlier closing hours and the presence of policewomen,” and the regulation of prostitution. Essentially, they worked to keep kids off the streets at night and to fight vice.73 Evans exemplifies the ways that older styles of civil rights lobbying and legal strategies overlapped with efforts to strengthen social work programs by integrating new federal resources. Evans furthered her civic commitment by fostering Chicago connections with the growing national network of skilled black workers emanat-

community development in an age of protest

67

ing from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Throughout the 1930s, she volunteered in Chicago’s Tuskegee Club, and in the mid-1930s she organized the popular annual Tuskegee-Wilberforce football game in the city.74 In this way, Evans developed close relationships with black trades workers and their families. As she later remembered, “I knew many carpenters, bricklayers, electricians, and so on. I heard about their hard times from their women. . . . The bricklayers wanted to be let in on a full basis to all jobs that opened up. So I spearheaded that movement with them.”75 She joined the Ladies Auxiliary of the Federated Hotel Waiters Union, Local 356, where she likely met Hodges, who was an inspector in the union.76 Hodges used connections with people like P. A. Glanton to find a job during the Depression when he could not practice his craft. In the 1920s he had supplemented his income as a waiter and as manager of the Savoy Ballroom.77 And during the Depression he worked at a downtown hotel and became a union officer in Local 356 of the Federated Hotel Waiters Union.78 Well into the postwar period, she and Hodges were in the same social circles and belonged to the same labor organizations. Not coincidentally, she was the only woman ever to have been admitted to the Brotherhood Club of Black Bricklayers.79 Not all black trades activists belonged to the part of the craft economy comprised of self-consciously respectable, striving individuals like Hodges and Evans. Doty was like many other skilled black trades workers in that he migrated from a southern city where he had learned his trade, but he took a much different political path than most black trades workers. Born in 1894 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Doty’s father, a structural engineer, died when he was an infant. Doty’s mother moved the family to Mobile, Alabama, to live with family. At the age of twelve, Doty quit school to take a job as an ice wagon driver to help his mother sustain the household. Two years later he moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where he found work as a machinist’s helper on a railroad. In 1913, he arrived in Chicago on his birthday and found a job in the stockyards. Ambitious and capable, within a year he managed to secure a transfer to a job as a pipefitter’s helper, a position he held for the next six years. In 1917, Doty moved up again to pipefitter, but still faced discrimination. He and dozens of black pipefitters in the five biggest meatpacking plants wanted to join the new Steamfitters’ Protective Association, but, he remembered later, the union leaders “looked out and saw our faces, and they slammed the door.” Doty and his fellow black pipefitters were forced to train new European immigrants only to see those new white workers move up to positions as fore-

68

chapter two

men in six months. The employers and the union both refused to allow black pipefitters to be foremen, “so we began leaving the yards.” While working in the stockyards, Doty learned plumbing through a mail correspondence course and with his new skills set out to start “doing jobs out in the city.”80 Black plumbers faced even worse discrimination than black bricklayers, which reinforced Doty’s tendency to fight for opportunity. Out in the city, Doty and other black plumbers found the union refused to admit black workers, and if they tried to get jobs on their own the police harassed them, effectively policing the racial barriers blocking entry into the craft. “We were actually locked up for carrying plumbers’ tools,” he told an interviewer years later, still exasperated with the hurdles a skilled worker needed to jump to get regular work in Chicago.81 Undaunted, Doty and fellow plumber A. W. Dunlop passed the plumbers’ examination of the Illinois Board of Examiners.82 As licensed, nonunion plumbers, however, they could only find nonunion work with black contractors in black communities. All this frustration compelled Doty to give up on the possibility of joining white-run craft unions. Instead, he played “the white craftsmen’s game, forming his own union and signing agreements with an association of black employers.”83 In 1926, Doty joined about one hundred other black plumbers to found the independent black Cook County Plumbers Union.84 But even with “union” status, and even after the AFL’s Pipe Trades District Council of Cook County allowed the black-led union to join the council, Doty and his fellow black workers could only find jobs through the all-black New Era Plumbing Contractors Association. The white Plumbing Contractors Association, which controlled three out of every four plumbing jobs, had a “closed shop” agreement with the white union locals.85 Doty did not give up. At the age of thirty-four he founded the American Consolidated Trades Council (ACTC), a coalition of skilled black trades workers that pushed the steamfitters, plumbers, roofers, and lathers unions to admit black members.86 As the leader of the ACTC and a member of the African Blood Brotherhood, Doty was at the center of a militant, urban nationalist segment of the black craft economy—people who sought to establish black workers in lucrative skilled trades as part of the larger goal of anti-capitalist black self-determination. In 1939, Doty and the ACTC allied with the National Negro Congress (NNC) in an attempt to prevent white unionists from “interfering with plumbers employed on several construction projects in [the

community development in an age of protest

69

far South Side neighborhood of] Lilydale. . . being constructed by Race subcontractors for citizens who had advanced the necessary capital.”87 Aligning with the NNC—a driving force in the city’s “New Crowd” of labor-civil rights activists—in a fight against white unions’ control over actual, in-progress construction jobs put Doty in a unique political position. Doty’s prewar coalition had a distinctly popular front character, meaning that it combined the energies of communist and noncommunist activists. It included William Patterson, associate editor of the Chicago Daily Record; Dewey R. Jones, a black Hull-House resident and president of the Chicago Council of the NNC; Orion N. Page, attorney for the NNC; and labor journalist George McCray.88 In the 1939 fight in Lilydale, they attempted secure an injunction to force the Plumbers’ Union to stop harassing black workers on the job. The ACTC hoped the injunction would mark “a new development in a 13–year-old fight of plumbers and steamfitters against the obstructive practices of building trades workers.”89 When their injunction failed, Doty and his allies flirted with joining the CIO’s United Construction Workers’ Organizing Committee.90 The Committee, however, had difficulties of its own; it could only secure jobs with contractors by agreeing to contracts with longer hours and lower wages than the AFL unions demanded. Not surprisingly, in a world where cost was second only to being “connected” as a consideration in handing out work, they won few contracts.91 In 1941, a frustrated Doty told the Chicago Tribune that black workers had been “knocking constantly on the doors of Chicago unions” since the stockyards strike of 1919 and still could not get work on union construction jobs.92 Whatever they did, black construction trades activists could not win entry into the tightly controlled white craft economy unless either they could find enough work in black neighborhoods to sustain them, as was the case for some black bricklayers, or find government allies in the antidiscrimination struggle. Members of the black craft economy generally shared the goal of securing union jobs for skilled black construction trades workers. They pressured white-led AFL unions to admit black workers with equal treatment for black members, and they promoted the development of black-owned contractor companies. During the late 1930s and 1940s, leaders of the black craft economy, like Glanton, Evans, and Hodges, who belonged to the upper levels of black Chicago society, also took advantage of their positions to develop relationships with the most powerful black officials and white liberals in government, business, and unions. But not all black craft workers held such high social status. Differences by trade mattered

70

chapter two

a great deal. Black plumbers like Doty did not enjoy even the limited access to union jobs that black bricklayers had won by the late 1930s. They often turned to more radical alliances in New York and Chicago in efforts to transform urban labor markets. Evans, Hodges, and Doty belonged to a network of black workers stretching across the country from vocational schools throughout the South, but especially from Tuskegee. The victories and frustrations of the black craft economy would affect thousands of workers hoping to build upon the dream of using trade skills to carve out a place not only in the rural South but in the urban North as well.

Coming Together in the Fight for Public Housing An eight-year battle in the 1930s to secure the first public housing project in a black neighborhood in Chicago brought together all of the black community’s various protest and development organizations in a cooperative effort. The drawn out struggle became mired in complicated efforts to overcome resistance from white real estate interests and their political allies and to secure the funding and tax exemptions necessary to build. To get over this string of hurdles, the effort to build what became known as the Ida B. Wells Homes “tapped a reservoir of anger, frustration and cynicism.”93 At the center of this effort was the Chicago Council of Negro Organizations. Founded in 1935 by Chicago Urban League leader A. L. Foster, the CCNO was an umbrella organization that sought to give voice to a vision of black politics that emphasized residential integration, business development in black communities, equal educational opportunities, and, to a degree, equal access to trade unions for black workers. By the late 1930s the Council of Negro Organizations listed fifty-seven affiliates representing over 100,000 people.94 At the same time, a distinct group of black labor and civil rights organizers formed the National Negro Congress, which also aspired to be an organization of organizations for African Americans. The leaders of the NNC articulated a radical critique of capitalism and focused directly on issues of organized labor and work that remained secondary for the CCNO. Leaders of the CCNO and the more radical NNC coexisted uneasily, with the NNC concerned that the CCNO was “trying to steal [its] thunder,” and the CCNO worried that the NNC “threatened its acceptance by the ‘masses.’”95 As important as such tensions were, however,

community development in an age of protest

71

they should not overshadow the kinds of political action the organizations aligned with the CCNO actually took and how their efforts in the late 1930s allowed the established organizations to adapt to the more militant political environment to retain influence in the politics of black Chicago during and after World War II. The effort to build a South Side housing project was much bigger than the CCNO. The fight included everything from lawsuits, closed-door negotiations, and political lobbying to mass meetings and street protests. Skilled black construction workers and unskilled black laborers alike hoped that they could win jobs on the project. They had reason to hope. Early in the New Deal the Public Works Administration (PWA) began experimenting with a “minimum percentage clause,” essentially a form of racial quotas in hiring for public construction projects. There was no guarantee that such quotas would bring real jobs—unions continued to hold nearly unchallenged influence over hiring and firing in the construction trades. Nonetheless, the PWA’s racial quotas, adopted by the United States Housing Authority, marked an early federal commitment to fair hiring.96 The fight for the Ida B. Wells Homes thus both required the support of a wide range of black Chicagoans and promised benefits to a broad swath of local residents. Even if it were not for the jobs the project potentially promised, the deepening housing crisis in the late 1930s created common cause for local politicians, activist and uplift groups, and the masses of black residents. Housing stood out as a core issue for all black Chicagoans, regardless of social status. Housing shortages would grow significantly worse during and after World War II, but even in the 1930s black Chicagoans struggled to find any housing at all. In the first eight years of the decade over 18,000 units had been demolished throughout the city, while only 7,619 had been built. In the most densely populated areas of the city—the nearly allblack Second and Third Wards—2,700 units were destroyed between 1934 and 1940.97 Local residents wanted decaying housing to be demolished, but only if it were replaced (see fig. 3). After a meeting with Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins on November 19, 1933, a Citizens’ Housing Committee was organized to represent the housing interests of the near South Side. Representatives brought the competing concerns of a wide range of organizations, including the American Legion, the African Methodist Episcopal Ministers’ Alliance, the Baptist Ministers’ Alliance, the Illinois Interracial Commission, the Chicago Urban League, the Wabash Avenue YMCA, the Social Service Round Table, the

72

chapter two

fig. 3. “Blighted” housing on South Parkway near the border of Douglas and Grand Boulevard. Photograph from Chicago Plan Commission, Master Plan of Residential Land Use of Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Plan Commission, 1943), 78.

South Central Community Council, and “a number of labor organizations.”98 For all their differences, in February 1934 the committee agreed on a plan submitted to the Illinois Housing Commission for an eighteen million dollar public housing project on a one-hundred-acre site bounded by 35th Street, Cottage Grove Avenue, Pershing Road, and Rhodes Avenue, with plans for an additional two-hundred-room hotel. Supporters included Chicago Urban League leaders Dr. M. O. Bousfield and A. L. Foster, as well as Robert Taylor, who would go on to become the first black director of the Chicago Housing Authority and was then manager of the privately owned Rosenwald Garden Apartments just south of the proposed site.99 This plan went nowhere, but it showed that the elite of black Chicago were behind public–private housing development in segregated parts of the city. Black Chicagoans were only beginning the eight-year fight for a housing project on the black South Side. Momentum began to build later in 1934 when the PWA began to plan for a seven million dollar “slum clearance” and construction project. However, the project faced immediate opposition from local white real estate interests. In December 1934, Clarence Poffen Berger, cashier of the Drexel State Bank and head of the Oakland Businessmen’s Association (based in the Oakland neighborhood just east of the proposed project) opposed the federal government’s plans. The Chicago Real Estate Board—a bastion of white real estate power— charged that property in Kenwood and Hyde Park “would not be worth

community development in an age of protest

73

10 cents on the dollar if the federal housing apartments for colored families are erected.” Board member Louis T. Orr “declared that the Negro housing project would become a permanent blight on that area.” “We say that if the government desires to erect a housing project for colored families,” Orr continued, “it should be over to the west of South Park Way, where the colored population has its schools, churches, and other social and civic advantages and not placed at the gateway to the Kenwood and Hyde Park area.”100 Though the proposed site was well within the allblack neighborhoods of the South Side, its location near then all-white neighborhoods and relatively close to Lake Michigan and the Loop all made it hotly contested turf. Opponents fought the project in the courts. In July 1935, lawyers for the city’s real estate board even went so far as to oppose the federal government’s claim that it had the right to take and clear land for housing.101 Later that month, they gained a major victory when the Sixth District U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that federal government could not condemn private land for public housing.102 The project, therefore, faced the difficult task of securing land from private property holders. In October 1935, PWA representatives reasserted the federal government’s commitment to what was then called the South Park Gardens Homes, despite opposition. “We want to build that project,” the official declared, “but if we cannot procure the property due mainly to chiselers who have stepped in there and advised the people not to sell, we may find it necessary to seek another site.”103 Those “chiselers” included both white and black homeowners in the area. More than 80 percent of the property was owned by absentee white landlords, many of whom had allowed their property to become run down or had even abandoned it altogether. Nonetheless, they demanded high prices from the government. So did black property owners, many of whom had mortgaged their holdings far above the market rate. The all-black Langley Avenue All-Nations Pentecostal Church and prominent local black residents such as Elder Lucy Smith, Bernice Hall, Elmer Hall, and Lizzie Strong together fought condemnation proceedings on their property in the U.S. District Court. This was not a case of black community resistance to the imposition of federal control over their property but rather an effort on the part of individual property holders to get a fair price from the federal government. One black homeowner in the area, John Barnes, told a Defender reporter that he had held out for a good price and once he got it, he “left all other objectors on their own.”104 Homeowners like Barnes faced the like-

74

chapter two

lihood that they would lose their property if the government did not buy it because they would not be able to maintain deteriorating properties or keep up with the payments on their over-mortgaged property. For a few black homeowners, then, the government project represented an opportunity to get out of personally troubling situations. Indeed, black Chicagoans generally welcomed the federal government as an ally in the fight to hold on to black claims on valuable land. Touching upon the fears that many black Chicagoans had long held, the Defender alleged that white real estate speculators had planned to “reclaim and rehabilitate the near South Side district from Michigan Avenue to the Lake and from the Loop to 55th Street for white collar workers.” Black Chicagoans, including homeowners, supported the project because it would maintain a community open to black residents and because it might provide jobs to black workers.105 As the Defender put it, “The attention of the colored property owners should be brought also to this fact; that in many instances his equity represents practically no actual value.” If the government did not buy the land, then “the very purpose of those who are objecting to the project shall have been accomplished, for the Negro will have been forced out of the area entirely.”106 In this, the Defender presciently pinpointed one of the sites of struggle in black community development over the following decades. From the late 1940s into the early twenty-first century, black Chicagoans have had to fight not only to improve the quality of life in their communities but also to hold on to the potentially highly valuable land where they had been sequestered by segregation.107 Support for the project among black Chicagoans only grew. Locals rallied against the effort to push black Chicagoans out of the land near Lake Michigan and against the rumors that public housing projects would only be built in white neighborhoods or for white residents on undeveloped land.108 One black South Sider told PWA representatives, “We are not going to accept a proposition over there west of State Street and along the railroad tracks. We don’t care to have smoke and soot from trains blowing on us—we have had enough of that. What we have been promised, and what we want is to be over there, where the lake can blow on us.”109 They yearned for the jobs the project might provide for black workers. They believed in their right to the land and hoped that such a project would raise the quality of life in the area. The fight for a public housing project won the interest of groups from a wide range of ideological and social positions, interested for their own reasons in community development. In August 1935, Rev. Richard Keller, as-

community development in an age of protest

75

sistant pastor of Pilgrim Baptist Church, presided over a mass meeting at Pilgrim to launch “a vigorous fight to save the South Side low-cost housing project which is being threatened by the activities of the Chicago Real Estate Board and civic organizations in Woodlawn, Hyde Park, and the Kenwood district.” Pilgrim Baptist Church Rev. Junius C. Austin encouraged his congregation to support the project. Plumber Ed Doty represented the Communist-aligned and black nationalist American Consolidated Trades Council, making “a plea for unemployed skilled Race workers.” Other speakers included A. L. Foster of the Urban League and the CCNO, and John Barnes Jr., president of the South Central Property Owners Association, a group working to secure “a fair and equitable price” for people cleared from the site. “The objectives of this undertaking,” the Defender declared, “are to provide jobs, to clean out a part of a slum district, and to provide a number of decent homes for deserving people.” Other organizations supporting the fight included the South Side Community Council, 47th Street Businessmen’s Club, Citizen’s Housing Committee, Ambassadors Club, Inter-Council of Clubs, 49th and State Inc., Le Moyne College Club, Second Ward Federation of Improvement Clubs, Chicago Federation of Community Organizations, Federation of Neighborhood Clubs, and the South Parkway Neighborhood Improvement Club.110 With such broad support in black Chicago, organizers in the CCNO worked to sustain the backing of Harold Ickes, the head of the PWA. When the Chicago Real Estate Board and Drexel State Bank lobbied against the project in Washington, D.C., the CCNO organized a delegation to defend it. The CCNO also organized letter-writing campaigns to demonstrate the mass desire for the project. At least according to the CCNO’s A. L. Foster, the organization managed to convince Ickes and others in Washington that “for once in the life of Chicago Negroes there was practically unanimous cooperation in a fight which meant everything to them.”111 Local activists would need Ickes’ support. The project continued to inch forward as the federal government bought and cleared lots one-byone in 1936 and early 1937. Still, on Valentine’s Day 1937, the Chicago Tribune declared that the project had “proven somewhat of an embarrassment” because the federal government only had enough funds committed to clear the project. There were no funds for construction, and progress stalled as officials in the new Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the federal government tried to figure out how to raise the money for construction.112 The Defender did not trust the CHA. In a March 20, 1937 editorial

76

chapter two

addressed to Secretary Ickes, the Defender explained, “The real estate situation in Chicago has reached an acute stage.” There were “little or no properties” to be had in black neighborhoods, and “the government has completed three projects for other racial identities but nothing has been completed to alleviate the housing condition among our group.” Moreover, the proposed housing project in black Chicago “is being fought by the Oakland Businessmen’s Association, Hyde Park Property Owners Association, and the Drexel State Bank interests.” “No relief can be expected” from the CHA. “John R. Fugard . . . is reported as stating that federal appropriations on national housing are exhausted, yet since his statement it is a matter of record that the government has spent several million dollars on a housing project in the state of Pennsylvania. The citizens of the South Side are beginning to think that conspiracy, not in Washington nor by the authority of anyone in Washington, but by the real estate owners in Chicago, has been formed to prevent them from benefiting by the government housing program.”113 Indeed, the problem was not a lack of federal funds but local resistance to distribution of those funds for black residents. The diversity of supporters for the housing project could be seen at a November 13, 1937 mass meeting at DuSable High School. Over one hundred organizations gathered for a rally and a parade. The speakers ranged from the influential local politician and religious leader Rev. Archibald Carey Jr. and prominent black insurance agent James Edgar Mitchem, to Doty, again representing the left wing of the movement for public housing. A “monster chorus” featuring the noted opera soprano Hortense Love kicked off the parade.114 The construction of public housing for black residents had taken on economic, political, and moral significance. The goals of the meeting included rallying support for the public housing project but also connected that immediate goal to a broader agenda of community development. Leaders of the CCNO believed their role was to educate the masses. They set out to “acquaint large numbers of Negroes with the necessity of united action in securing relief from the pressure of overcrowded housing conditions.” Significantly, they connected the need for more housing to a wider variety of demands, which overlapped with the goals of the more confrontational left-labor groups. The CCNO called out discrimination against black workers in skilled jobs in public and private utilities, transportation, and wholesale distribution. They encouraged tenants to demand services from absentee landlords. They sought to organize a group of affluent black Chicagoans to cooperate in a plan to

community development in an age of protest

77

gain access to privately owned housing in white neighborhoods. And they condemned white-run labor unions that prevented black “skilled workmen from driving food and milk trucks, operating street cars, buses, elevated trains, and motion picture machines.”115 As early as 1937, the leaders of a movement to build public housing in Chicago fostered a broader vision of community development politics that saw issues such as housing, good jobs, hiring quotas, and desegregation as interlinked goals, and as shared aspirations that could build bridges across divisions of politics, ideology, and class within black Chicago. In December 1937, prospects for the project seemed to rise when the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937 promised about twenty million dollars for Chicago and CHA head Fugard suggested he would use ten million dollars to build South Park Gardens. But Fugard noted “one hitch”— 10 percent of the project’s cost would have to come from local sources, and “Mr. Fugard was not prepared to say where this sum would come from.”116 In January 1938, Fugard said he expected construction to begin within six months. He said that plans for raising 10 percent of the cost still needed to be made and about forty plots still needed to be cleared.117 Yet even as white Chicagoans planned to move into three other federal housing projects in the spring of 1938, the South Park Gardens project remained stalled in the face of continued opposition. In March, the Defender reported suggestions that Newton C. Farr, head of the YMCA, president of the Oakland-Kenwood Property Owners Association, former president of the Chicago Real Estate Board, member of the district council of the Stockyards District of the United Charities, and notorious real estate speculator, was studying legal action against the South Park Gardens project. In response, an unnamed representative of former owners of property on the site threatened a countersuit “to force the government to proceed immediately with the project which has been allowed to drag along untouched too long.” Farr said he was opposed to the site, the type of construction, and the financing.118 At issue was the requirement that the housing project be exempted from state and local taxes. Taxes that would have been collected on rents in the project would instead go to subsidizing its construction and maintenance. Opponents of the plan, including Illinois Governor Henry Horner, argued this was unfair and unconstitutional. This, despite the three previous projects for white residents built with the same financing structure.119 Again the broad support for the project came through. In June 1938, the Defender, the Urban League, the Cook County Physicians Associa-

78

chapter two

tion, the United Alumni Association, the Council of Negro Organizations, the Social Service Round Table, and other groups sent delegates to Springfield. The Urban League’s Frayser T. Lane and alderman William L. Dawson addressed a Senate committee meeting as part of a delegation that included the Negro Labor Relations League’s Joseph Jefferson as well as other members of the CCNO. The Defender circulated 50,000 flyers asking citizens to write legislators, the governor, and the mayor.120 Finally, in July 1938, the Illinois State Senate approved a Housing Bill that would allow for tax exemptions for the South Park Gardens Project, opening the way for its construction. The housing bill went through over the objections of white real estate leaders like Newton Farr after Governor Horner did not sign the bill but allowed it to pass.121 With the hurdles to financing the project finally overcome, black Chicagoans then turned to efforts to secure jobs for black workers on the project. The Chicago chapter of the National Technical Association—an association of black professionals—sought the appointment of an African American as associate architect, chief construction engineer, engineering inspectors, and architectural draftsmen. The Defender argued “black skilled and unskilled laborers should be compensated with jobs on the new project for those which were denied them on the others.”122 The United States Housing Authority backed black Chicagoans’ demands for jobs on the project, withholding funds “while plans are being worked out to force local housing officials to give the Race a fair share of jobs in all categories of unemployment.” Here the Chicago activists’ connections to the New Deal paid off. As the Defender put it, after Chicago officials “doublecrossed members of the Race seeking assurance of jobs of all types on the project,” activists secured the assistance of Chicago-based black New Dealer Dr. Robert C. Weaver in winning a plan that would “guarantee Race labor equitable representation.”123 One of the highest-ranking African Americans in the federal government, Weaver used his influence to ensure that the federal housing authority would adopt racial quotas in hiring, at least in places where local opposition to black workers could be overcome. In order to overcome resistance from white-led unions to hiring black workers, federal officials like Weaver depended upon pressure from community groups. CCNO leader and Urban League head A. L. Foster credited the Urban League, the American Consolidated Trades Council, and the Brotherhood Club of Black Bricklayers for winning jobs for black workers on the South Park Project, which had been renamed the Ida B.

community development in an age of protest

79

Wells Homes. For the first time, Local 130 of the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Union granted permission to five black plumbers, including Doty, to work on a public construction project.124 Evans remembered that she led a committee of the CCNO and local black laborers to Washington, D.C., where they secured an interview with Sidney Hillman and forced a full investigation of the Ida B. Wells construction site.125 Hodges, who had taken a job in a hotel to survive the Depression, left that position to take up the fight against the Chicago Housing Authority for jobs for black trades workers on the project. He took the campaign for jobs at the Ida B. Wells Homes as a turning point in his life. “It was there I never let up, kept fighting,” Hodges wrote later, “and with the fair assistance given us by the Chicago Housing Authority, and by Mr. A. L. Foster [Chicago Urban League executive secretary],” they won jobs for more than forty black bricklayers. “We finished this job, a good one, with much credit.”126 Hodges, indeed, won much credit for his work on the project. On August 31, 1940, the Defender celebrated the completion of the Ida B. Wells Homes with a photograph of Hodges, surrounded by the project’s officials, laying the last of the job’s nine million bricks.127

Strength in a “Diversity of Competing Leaders” The late 1930s have been remembered as a time when black Chicagoans made lasting contributions to the cause of working-class-based labor and civil rights protest politics. At the same time, it must be remembered that a wide range of individuals and organizations continued to struggle for improvement on issues directly related to the interests of black community development. They waged battles to secure housing in white neighborhoods, to build housing in black communities, to secure jobs for skilled black workers, and to build public housing on the South Side. These “middle-class” issues, and the people and institutions who focused on them, must be included in any complete picture of the late 1930s in order to understand the full implications of that era of increased activism. As Drake and Cayton explained, a wide range of political actions—the fight to get a public housing project built over the objections of white real estate interests, Carl A. Hansberry’s successful suit against restrictive covenants in a subdivision just south of Washington Park, and renewed boycott movements to force employers to hire black workers—all depended upon “the Negro’s political power implemented by the threat of mass

80

chapter two

action, and even of violence.” These movements were characterized by a broad commitment to racial solidarity, although not necessarily political unity. “Paradoxically enough, they have come not from a monolithic unity but from a diversity of competing leaders stimulating each other to win gains for the Negro people.”128 Class and ideological tensions in black Chicago created extremely varied political movements. But those different strands of labor, political, and community-based activism could unite when a concrete political project—like the Ida B. Wells Homes—offered something for everyone. Community-based politics remained central to black Chicago’s political culture largely because community development offered something for everyone from the elite integrationist to the striving entrepreneur to the working-class migrant. If black Chicago had continued to develop on the same basic scale it had in the late 1930s, there was, perhaps, the possibility for creating a successful politics of community development. Black Chicagoans were developing the institutions that might have made it possible— despite intraracial differences and racism—to continue the trends of political, social, and economic advancement, lifting the entire community as one in the process. In the late 1930s, black Chicago arguably was still small enough that the combined efforts of radical trade unionists, boycotting entrepreneurs, party-building politicians, and neighborhood-defending community activists might have created a base of political and economic power that could have been a springboard for black community advancement. Such counterfactual musings are inherently flawed, of course. But the conjecture is useful here because the reality of black Chicago’s development during and after World War II fell so far short of the dream of a solid and self-sufficient Black Metropolis. Therefore, it is essential to recognize that on the eve of the Second Great Migration—despite an extraordinary record of political, economic, and community development relative to other African American communities—black Chicagoans remained divided by ideology, personal interests, class, and political styles. In the coming years, they competed for gains for themselves and for black Chicago as a whole. But together they had created the base from which black Chicagoans would seek to open wartime opportunities to black workers and to seek individual opportunity and social advancement in the face of a housing shortage, uneven economic opportunity, and an increasingly closed political system in the postwar years.

chapter three

“Will ‘Our People’ Be Any Better Off After This War?”

I

n 1945, Robert C. Weaver, former director of the Negro Employment and Training Branch of the Office of Production Management (OPM) and executive director of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations in Chicago, concluded that the greatest effect of World War II on black workers was “a change in occupational aspirations.”1 World War II marked a pivotal moment for black Americans generally and for black Chicagoans in particular. Between 1940 and January 1945, black employment in the Chicago area grew from 80,347 to 222,600—an increase from 4.9 to 11.7 percent of the total number of people working. Although the vast majority of job gains came after 1942, the increase in employment outpaced the growth in the local black population from 7.1 to 9.4 percent of the city’s total population.2 Black men and women not only found jobs in unprecedented numbers, they also moved from the service to the industrial sector at a rate never seen before. Black Chicagoans in white-collar work and skilled construction trades also took advantage of the expanding federal government and federally financed construction jobs to pursue their longstanding goals of individual opportunity, jobs, and economic development. War industries created a variety of openings for black Chicagoans from all job sectors and every level of society, and they created opportunities for community activists who had grown increasingly active during the late 1930s to extend their efforts. But, in addition to raising black workers’ occupational aspirations, perhaps the war’s greatest effect was to remake the socioeconomic structure, creating extraordinary opportunities for some black workers, despite the obstacles it continued to present to others and the overall persistent racial inequality for black Chi-

82

chapter three

cagoans relative to their white neighbors. World War II set the stage for the political and social changes of the postwar era by setting precedents for the modern civil rights movement and by creating a greater diversity of opportunities within black communities.3 Black activists continued to build upon the history of protest politics they had forged in the 1930s. Working-class black activists in Chicago and across the country took advantage of the wartime economic boom to open jobs and to push for social advancement for African Americans.4 In industrial cities throughout the North and West workers built an interracial union movement, while on the shop floor African Americans expressed their discontent with wage and seniority discrimination in widespread wildcat strikes. The war was a boon to black labor-based activism. Formal civil rights organizations also flourished. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) grew almost tenfold, from approximately fifty thousand to half a million members, between 1940 and 1946. The black press seized on the ideological implications of a war against Nazism and promoted the “Double V” campaign for victory against racism in the United States and against fascism abroad. Masses of African Americans nationwide supported A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement (MOWM), and African Americans on and off military camps throughout the South forcibly resisted Jim Crow’s restrictions on their freedom.5 As it had in the 1930s, the world of wartime activism included a broad range of individuals and organizations. While the March on Washington Movement gained momentum and industrial union members struggled to secure the benefits of an unprecedented labor shortage, the members of black Chicago’s middle class sought to take advantage of connections to federal officials and the growth of the federal labor bureaucracy to secure jobs for themselves and for the masses of black workers. Black Chicagoans developed key connections to the federal government, both because prominent local people rose into the highest ranks of the federal bureaucracy and because the New Deal bureaucracy reached directly into local black neighborhoods. Local people worked with federal officials in Washington, D.C., including Weaver and other Chicago-based representatives of the OPM, as well as with the locally run South Side branch of the United States Employment Service (USES), to open up jobs that even the wartime boom had not made available. The OPM and USES suffered from weaknesses similar to those that undermined the more familiar Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). President

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

83

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 banned discrimination in the defense industries and formed the FEPC in response to A. Philip Randolph’s threatened mass march of one hundred thousand African Americans on Washington, D.C. The Committee represented a dramatic new federal involvement in the politics of race and employment, and black workers rallied to the agency. In practice, though, the FEPC did not have the authority to enforce Roosevelt’s ban. In the words of historian Eric Arnesen, “the new policy of antidiscrimination clashed with the more dominant policy of uninterrupted war production.”6 The OPM and USES similarly provided hope that the state would fight racial inequality yet did little to change broader patterns of racial segregation and discrimination. The black Chicagoans who developed the closest connections to the OPM and USES included those in the city’s boycott movement and the black craft economy.7 Indeed, many of the same individuals who had helped to ensure that the Ida B. Wells Homes would be built, and built with black labor, also secured job opportunities for themselves and other black workers during the war. Inspired as much by fears that wartime opportunities would be temporary as by the broader fight for economic equality and civil rights, black workers inside and outside of the organized labor movement scrambled to take advantage of the wartime economic boom. Black Chicagoans and the decentralized federal labor bureaucracy created uneven opportunities for black workers and redistributed political and economic power within the Black Metropolis. As the wartime economic boom ended the Great Depression and sparked the greatest economic expansion in black Chicago’s history, it also reinforced social and economic differences within black communities. The war set the stage for decades of increasingly uneven economic opportunity, while also remaking Chicago’s unusual combination of intraracial class tensions and persistent racial discrimination. Reflecting on wartime politics in black Chicago, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton explained that “a note of anxiety ran through all of Bronzeville’s war activity.” That anxiety was “reflected not only in newspaper discussion, but also at the grass roots—in churches, at social club meetings, on the street corners. One of the questions that bothered Bronzeville was a source of anxiety to other Americans also, ‘Will there be a depression after the war?’ But another question was a special one, ‘Will ‘our people’ be any better off after this war?’”8 In the face of uneven opportunity during and after World War II, and widening class differences among black Chicagoans, it would become in-

84

chapter three

creasingly difficult to say who, exactly, should be included among “our people.” If the lesson of the wartime labor and civil rights struggles was that the threat of mass pressure could change government policy, the lesson of the wartime and postwar economic boom was that a growing economy held out the viable hope for gradual, individual economic progress. The economic roots of black Chicago’s fragmented, liberal postwar political culture can be found in the war.

Black Workers’ Wait for Wartime Jobs World War II created the greatest single increase in economic opportunities for black workers in American history. But early wartime opportunities eluded black workers in the city both because jobs came to Chicago late and because black workers were the last hired. Defense industries grew slowly in Chicago, but when they emerged they transformed the city’s job market. In 1940, African Americans made up almost one-half of all public relief cases in the city although they were only 7.1 percent of the population.9 In 1940 and 1941, defense industries in Chicago lagged behind those of other major cities—as late as October 1941, Illinois ranked fourteenth in the nation in the volume of federal contracts—and nearly all the jobs that did open went to white workers.10 At the end of 1941, as local white workers reached near full employment, approximately 71,000 black workers continued to receive relief.11 Between 1942 and 1945, black workers finally climbed out of the Depression. At the beginning of 1942, African Americans held only 2 percent of all jobs in essential military industries nationwide, but by 1945 they had 8 percent of the positions.12 In 1942, the military began to demand a previously unimagined amount of foodstuffs, steel, machines, and ordnance— manufactured by major enterprises in the Chicago metropolitan region. The increases after Pearl Harbor were amazing; in 1940 the federal government ordered ten billion dollars of military products, but in the first six months of 1942 alone the federal government signed one hundred billion dollars in defense contracts.13 After 1942, then, tight labor markets eventually forced employers to hire women and African Americans. Between the spring of 1942 and the fall of 1944 approximately 1.5 million black laborers nationwide entered the war-production workforce, increasing the proportion of black workers in the defense industries from 2.5 percent to 8.3 percent nationally. Nearly half of these jobs were concentrated in the

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

85

fourteen largest industrial cities, meaning that tens of thousands of black Americans were forced to migrate in search of wartime opportunity.14 Between 1940 and 1945, at least sixty to seventy thousand black southerners migrated to Chicago to take advantage of the booming economy.15 Newcomers and established black Chicagoans alike found greatly improved opportunities. “The Second World War was a war of ‘bits and pieces,’” one historian wrote in the wake of the conflict, describing the thousands of manufacturing and processing companies that converted to military production.16 In the Chicago Ordnance District alone, over eighteen thousand companies produced materiel for the war effort, and it was this increased productivity that ultimately lifted American workers out of the Depression. In the various packinghouses, for instance, the number of employees grew between 30 and 100 percent between 1942 and 1945.17 Chicago’s service industries expanded as well because the city became perhaps the most important crossroad for domestic military travel. Black workers who could not find higher-paying jobs in industrial production staffed the city’s busy train stations, hotels, and restaurants. In addition, the percentage of black Chicagoans in manufacturing increased from less than 20 percent of employed African Americans in 1940 to more than 51 percent in 1945.18 The greatest wartime increases in black manufacturing work occurred in “chemical and petroleum products, non-ferrous metals, iron and steel, transportation equipment, electrical and other machinery, other munitions, food and tobacco, and leather products.”19 Chicago’s diverse industries allowed black workers with widely different skill levels to find jobs during the war. But black workers as a whole remained confined to the lower rungs of the job ladder, and black workers’ positions in the job market became increasingly stratified. How this happened is a complex story of individual workers seeking the best opportunities for themselves, and finding those opportunities depended upon connections with a wide range of local black-run institutions.

“The Corner Grocery Stores of Our Manpower System” When President Franklin D. Roosevelt called local offices of the United States Employment Service “the corner grocery stores of our manpower system,” he might have had in mind Local Office #8 of the United States

86

chapter three

Employment Service at the heart of Chicago’s black South Side neighborhoods.20 Located at 4711 South Parkway—just north of the Regal Theater and Savoy Ballroom, and in the same building as the Madame C. J. Walker Beauty College—Local Office #8 became a hub for workers seeking jobs, antidiscrimination advocacy, and unemployment compensation. The USES became a community institution in Chicago’s Black Metropolis. The USES was the civilian arm of a federal wartime labor bureaucracy that generally reinforced racial discrimination in the labor market. Administered by thousands of offices across the country, the decentralized, temporary service catered to the demands of military production officers on the War Production Board and the Army’s Chief of Ordnance, while also serving the interests of local employers.21 Official USES policy directed local interviewers “to make definite effort to persuade employers to eliminate specifications” that discriminated against workers according to their race, color, creed, or national origin; to report instances of discrimination to the FEPC; and “to refuse to make referrals on employer orders which include discriminatory specifications,” but only “in those states where such specifications are contrary to state law.” Where state law allowed racial discrimination, so did the USES. In addition, the USES was to fill requests for job training programs without consideration of race, color, creed, or national origin, except “where separate educational facilities for whites and Negroes are required by law.”22 The USES was typical of the time when, to borrow a phrase from Ira Katznelson, “affirmative action was white.” This is not exactly an “untold history,” but it is one that historians continue to flesh out, revealing how the implementation of social policy furthered racial inequalities in everything from the distribution of relief to Social Security to New Deal agricultural reform.23 The USES generally fits squarely into this sad story of government-sponsored racial disparities. Fittingly, during the summer of 1942, the federal employment bureaucracy floundered without any “real authority” over employers or workers. “Employers without let or hindrance hired men regardless of the source from which they came; sent out recruiters to pirate laborers from other war industries, including even their own subcontractors, and hoarded employees,” while many workers hopped from job to job looking for the best wages.24 And, of course, employers completely controlled decisions about whether to offer jobs to black workers. Although national wage freezes after October 3, 1942 reduced one incentive to move from one job to another, the problem of employee turn-

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

87

over remained critical throughout the second half of the war. Local Office #8 manager William Gist pointed out that in the last week of November 1943 alone 1,575 workers quit defense production jobs in fifty essential war plants. Gist estimated that “each worker who quits loses on the average about two weeks’ productive work.” The problem became so acute that the WMC empowered USES officials to recommend a draftage “job hopper” for armed service, or to declare the worker eligible for a “work station” set up at Camp Ellis in western Illinois.25 Such drastic individual punishments were not practical in the context of a massive effort to mobilize labor. On December 5, 1942, President Roosevelt extended the WMC’s authority; in labor-short areas, all hiring of men—and women after February 1943—in the defense industries was to be done through the USES. The service still did not serve, or have any influence over hiring practices in, companies that did not hold federal defense contracts. Nonetheless, defense industries in Chicago employed tens of thousands of men and women, and Roosevelt sought to make sure those black and white workers would go through the USES. Roosevelt’s executive order institutionalized at the national level a system created earlier under voluntary Employment Stabilization Plans. The earlier plans, established by forty-four cities, including Chicago, “froze” workers on their current jobs, and required special permission and documentation for workers seeking to move from job to job.26 Under the national employment stabilization plan, the USES gained the authority to require Certificates of Availability to check persistent turnover.27 For the remainder of the war, workers who wanted to secure new jobs in the defense industries either needed a Certificate of Availability or were forced to sit out a six-month penalty period before they could register with the USES again. In order to obtain a certificate from the local USES office, the worker needed to show that he or she had been fired from a previous job or that he or she had justifiable cause to move from one job to another or one city to another. Women and men needed certificates to change jobs; in fact, according to one historian, “women were screened more carefully.”28 If a worker owed debts to a former employer, or if the worker’s previous workplace was listed as an essential war industry and the employer did not want the employee to leave, it was conceivable that he or she could be made to return. Even if the applicant had been unemployed, he or she had to have a Certificate of Availability to secure a job in a war plant in another region, which potentially placed migrants at the mercy of their local USES administrators.

88

chapter three

While screening for Certificates of Availability in daily hiring offices was likely lax, in the right context the certificates could provide local government officials with immense potential power. Antagonistic local USES officers in the South, for example, used their power to try to prevent black workers from leaving rural areas in the region to find war work in cities in the South, West, or North. They failed to stem the tide of black migration, of course; in 1944, one South Side USES office received approximately one hundred “in-migrants” per week, and only about two “outmigrants” a week.29 But they did make things more difficult for individual black migrants moving within the South and from region to region. In May 1942, for instance, a group of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, the U.S. Congress, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the War Production Board, and the FEPC, noting that black workers were not allowed to work at the Mississippi Ordnance Plant and that the Jackson USES would not take applications from black workers.30 Moreover, migrant workers found that Certificates of Availability could become unwanted ties to powerful whites in their former hometowns. Reflecting on such cases, Chicago Defender editors complained that local officials were trying to use reasonable wartime regulations in order to “maintain a pool of slave labor for southern plantation owners.” “Whether it was intended that way or not,” the Defender asserted, “the War Manpower Commission edicts are being applied in such a manner as to keep southern Negro farm hands in virtual peonage.”31 In one remarkable case in 1943, four former sharecroppers from Isola, Mississippi, appealed to the local USES office in Joliet, Illinois, because local USES officials in Isola were seeking to extradite them back to the South until they paid off the “debts” their former landlords claimed they owed.32 Willie Williams, Edward Lee Sanders, William Green, and Samuel Adams had all left behind intolerable conditions. Isola was the kind of place in Mississippi where black sharecroppers were at the mercy of dishonest landlords. As one former Mississippi resident explained to the Chicago Defender in 1943, the Delta was a “kind of an outlaw place. . . . If the boss wants you to clear somethin’ you did. If he didn’t, you stayed in debt. We got tired of that, so we left the farm. I don’t care what you know, you better not say nothin’. That kind of thing just grinds a man’s heart.”33 Landowners notoriously imposed unfair debts on their tenants to keep them on the farm. The four workers in Joliet had faced just such oppressive conditions. Green had worked on R. D. Bole’s farm in Isola from 1941 to 1944. By

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

89

the end of the 1944 season, Green owed Bole $15.75, and local officials told him he could not leave “without the farm owner’s consent.” Indeed, Green claimed that much of his “debt” actually was a penalty for showing interest in leaving the farm—when Bole found that Green was ready to go, he increased his debt to $95.75. Green told the FEPC investigator that he paid the sixty dollars he could afford and “escaped.”34 Williams had a similar experience. He ended the 1943 season owing his landlord, “Mr. Hanicker,” $53.15. Williams first tried to improve his situation by moving to another farm owned by Percy Allen, who agreed to take responsibility for Williams’s debts to Hanicker. Fearing that he would once again end up in debt, Williams decided to leave. His sister, who had already moved to Chicago, sent him a train ticket. For nearly a year, Williams survived by working odd jobs until finally in November 1944 he found a job through the Joliet USES at the American Steel and Wire Company. Even this new job did not release him from his obligations to Hanicker. As a federal investigator noted, the defense industry job was only a temporary reprieve. The Yazoo City USES office granted a release to Williams, but only until March 1, 1945, when “he was expected to return to Mississippi to again engage in farm work.”35 Green and Williams’s experiences were not unique; the FEPC official investigating their cases described their treatment to Regional Director Elmer Henderson as part of a “system” and “policy” in southern USES offices.36 Green, Williams, Sanders, and Adams all refused to return to the South because they feared retribution in their former hometowns and because they found better jobs in the North. “I won’t go back,” Williams told the Chicago Defender. “It’s bad enough down there . . . but when they get to the place they can keep you there, it’ll be hell.”37 In less than a year at American Steel and Wire Company Williams had progressed from a laborer’s position making seventy-eight cents per hour to a machine helper earning $1.06 per hour. Green worked at Sanderson and Porter Company, an ammunition manufacturer, making ninety-six cents an hour. Such remarkable wage increases allowed Williams to support his three children, and Green to support his six children. Moreover, to Adams, a World War I veteran with two sons serving in World War II, the local officials’ attempts to abridge his liberty to move freely was especially upsetting.38 For migrants like Green, Williams, Sanders, and Adams, a northern city like Joliet was a step up from the Mississippi Delta. Yet the industrial suburb of Joliet was far from a perfect sanctuary. Despite appeals from an interracial group of ministers, labor leaders, and

90

chapter three

community activists, the Joliet USES officials held the four migrants accountable to their former landlords’ debt claims.39 All four lost their war industry jobs and could not get new defense jobs in the North without permission from the USES in Mississippi. They were forced to wait out the six-month penalty period, when they were eligible to reapply for a Certificate of Availability with a USES office in Illinois. “This appeal procedure,” argued the migrants’ advocates, “places these workers in the power of southern reactionaries . . . a coalition of southern farm owners, draft board members . . . and WMC [officials], to keep a supply of cheap Negro labor pinned to the southern farms.”40 The decentralized USES reinforced southern debt peonage as a matter of policy. Racial discrimination by the USES clearly was not confined to the South. USES policy provided an important loophole for any local USES official who wanted to limit referrals to workers of a particular race, color, creed, or national origin. “If the employer does not include any discriminatory specifications in his order,” USES policy stated, “but community custom or past hiring practices of the employer indicate that he may refuse to hire individuals of a particular race, color, creed, or national origin, the employment office interviewer shall ascertain whether or not he has any restrictive specifications.”41 In other words, employers seeking to hire only white workers could omit any reference to discriminatory preferences in a requisition form, but a like-minded employment service official could then merely send the “right” workers without threat of any punishment. Few local USES officials were committed to the project of antidiscrimination. Nationally, the USES itself was the subject of sixty-nine FEPC complaints between 1943 and 1945.42 Despite the employment service’s complicity in wartime racial discrimination, black Chicagoans rallied to Local Office #8. “The feeling among applicants” on the South Side, wrote one supervisor, “appears commonly to be along the line that this is their office. Workers come to the office not only when they are looking for a job, but they come to the office also for a good many other reasons.”43 Office #8 was especially busy, routinely receiving between two and ten thousand applicants every week. By comparison, Local Office #4 near the center of a working-class Polish population on the city’s Northwest Side received only six hundred applicants per week in 1943.44 Black migrants generally found jobs more often than white workers through USES listings, and African Americans visited Local Office #8 in particular at higher rates in large part because black workers needed

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

91

the unskilled or semiskilled jobs that many white workers snubbed during the war.45 While virtually all white workers could obtain jobs by applying directly to employers, many black workers—especially newcomers without connections in the city—needed the USES to open doors to entry-level industrial jobs. Black migrants, therefore, benefited disproportionately when the volume of USES placements in Illinois—the majority in Chicago—increased from only a few thousand workers per month at the beginning of the war to over seventy-five thousand in January 1944. Office #8 served three-quarters of all black Chicagoans—at a time when the city’s African-American population increased from 277,831 to approximately 350,000.46 Local Office #8 was unique among local USES offices that generally “suffered from uneven, often low-grade personnel, and [were] chronically under funded.”47 In contrast, the staff of Local USES Office #8 consisted of between thirty and sixty college-educated local residents who were especially committed to improving job opportunities and providing advice to black workers. William E. Gist, manager of Local Office #8, represented the core black middle-class in Chicago. He had graduated from the University of Chicago School of Business, was a member of the Board of Deacons at the politically connected Church of the Good Shepherd, and belonged to one of the most active fraternities in black Chicago, Kappa Alpha Psi. Gist built relationships with the Chicago Defender, the Chicago Urban League, the Chicago chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the South Parkway YWCA, and other community groups. With their help Office #8 publicized instances of discrimination and brought community pressure to bear on discriminatory employers.48 Gist was far from alone. Era Bell Thompson, Chicago’s most famous African-American migrant from North Dakota, built on her experience as a college-educated migrant when working for the USES. Living at the YWCA and helping run small-time black neighborhood newspapers on shoestring budgets, Thompson began what became a distinguished career in journalism.49 After the war, she became one of the star reporters for John H. Johnson’s Chicago magazines.50 Thompson, especially, exhibited the commitment to the local community that drove the staff of Local Office #8. As a migrant to Chicago, Thompson empathized with many of her clients at the employment service. “To most of us who come to Chicago from less glamorous regions,” Thompson wrote in 1950, “and believe me, that is most of us—the problem of big city adjustment is as important

92

chapter three

as finding a place to live, a place to work. I had trouble with all three.”51 She particularly relished the chance to assist other black women in the workforce. As Thompson explained in 1943, she helped open wartime employment to two groups of black women: “the domestic worker who is grasping the opportunity to escape the hated servant life for that of the better-paying, shorter-hour factory job where she can go home nights and doesn’t have to say ‘yes ma’am’ to the foreman; and the college-trained professionals and specialists who are still banging their heads against the closed doors of industry.”52 For each group, the tight wartime labor markets and USES job listings provided at least the hope of social mobility. “Women are changeable,” Thompson wrote, “and these are on the march! The domestics want clerical jobs, the clerks want factory jobs, and the factory workers want more money.”53 Black women, who had had the most difficulty moving up the job ladder, saw World War II as an opportunity to climb into the ranks of better paying work. Officials like Gist and Thompson opened doors for black workers as the wartime economic boom created unprecedented occupational opportunity and diversity in black Chicago. In 1942 alone, Chicago’s eighteen thousand ordnance businesses produced as much as the Chicago’s Ordnance District had manufactured during all of World War I.54 As early as January 1942, Chicago’s steel industries began employing black workers in large numbers. Inland Steel in East Chicago had 1,700 black workers, with 230 as steel and iron chippers and 300 as crane operators. American Transportation Corporation had 500 black workers with 50 as hydraulic riveters and 100 as hydraulic “buckers up.” Continental Roll and Steel Foundry employed 400 black workers, American Steel Foundry 500, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company 1,200, and the Carnegie Steel Company in Gary had 3,700 in foundry jobs.55 As the need for labor grew “particularly noticeable,” black workers, and black migrants in particular, found more jobs through the USES between 1943 and 1945.56 Shortages were especially serious in “foundries, forges, steel mills, and brass strip mills” and were caused less by the draft than by failure of recruiters to convince men to leave “non-essential,” better-paid jobs to take positions in “essential industries,” and by the failure to convince “more women to leave domestic life for work in plants.”57 No longer could the Ordnance District fill factory positions by recruiting women out of their homes or upgrading local black workers. Munitions plant managers turned to workers directly from the rural South. As one manager of a Will County plant said, “Men with no other experience

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

93

than farming have been developed very often into very good operators.”58 Yet even black male newcomers to the city were difficult to recruit, and the Ordnance District finally resorted to hiring black female migrants. As the Army’s historian put it, “Green or inexperienced male labor became almost non-existent.” Black women could be found “if unusual recruiting efforts were employed,” but by the end of the war, as one Regional FEPC official noted, “practically all available Negro women were working in some form or fashion.”59 The USES also helped black workers enter job training programs and placed black workers in semiskilled and skilled jobs. In Chicago, there were fifty-two “preemployment training classes” in eight different schools available to black workers, and Local USES Office #8 referred fifteen to twenty applicants to training classes per week during the war. About one quarter completed the training.60 By 1943, black workers made up 29 percent of students in preemployment training programs for aircraft production.61 Many of these trained workers still had difficulty finding skilled jobs. “It is commonly known,” wrote one USES official, “that when a colored applicant is referred to a skilled or semi-skilled job, there is a tendancy [sic] on the part of some employer[s] to accept the applicant, but to place him on a job other than the one specified on the order.”62 Nonetheless, increasing numbers of black workers entered skilled work in labor-short defense plants. Between October 1943 and August 1944, the number of black employees at the Dodge Aircraft plant increased from less than 300 to 3,259.63 As the war progressed, some black women even found jobs in Chicago’s most desirable plants. In 1943, Lucia Bendino Hackney, a newcomer from New Orleans, where she had graduated from Xavier University, worked in a semiskilled job at Western Electric’s famous Hawthorne Plant.64 By 1943, over half of the Ordnance District’s seven thousand civilian workers were women, and the majority of those women—white and black—were plant inspectors. A 1943 Ordnance District press release called for “three hundred women a month . . . for training as inspectors. Excellent results have been obtained by placing women as inspectors of various fuze [sic] parts and small ammunition components.” The inspector jobs were attractive; they came with paid training at the Illinois Institute of Technology, it was “clean” work, and at a salary of $1,620 per year, new inspectors earned approximately the same as the average packinghouse worker.65 Dozens of black workers also found skilled and unskilled work at the ordnance plants that black tradesmen had helped build.66 In addition, Local Office #8 ran a program “giving spe-

94

chapter three

cial assistance to handicapped workers seeking jobs” at a time when many veterans were returning with disabilities and the Illinois State WMC director Charles P. Casey estimated that “about 23 million persons, or onefifth of the nation’s population are disabled in some way.”67 Black workers who entered skilled and semiskilled production jobs, however, were exceptions. Overall, almost 90 percent of the black workers who entered the workforce through Local Office #8 entered unskilled service (30.3 percent) or manufacturing (58.4 percent) work.68 African Americans in the Chicago area made the greatest gains in nonmunitions manufacturing where their share of the jobs increased from 3.4 percent to 20.4 percent between 1940 and 1945. These workers generally held unskilled jobs in stockyards, candy factories, bakeries, the apparel industry, furniture production, and the making of paper goods. Black workers also increased their share of positions in munitions manufacturing by 8.4 percent, government jobs by 8.2 percent, and service positions by 6.7 percent. But again, most black workers in ordnance plants did the unskilled work in foundries and munitions plants rather than the coveted skilled work making airplanes and electrical equipment (fig. 4).69 By February 1943, local USES officers had the authority to cancel orders for workers when they contained “discriminatory specifications,” but few local USES officials were committed to the project of antidiscrimination. Though the agency had great potential to combat job discrimination, it never followed through.70 On the whole, the top-down efforts to train USES employees not to send applicants to discriminatory employers were limited and ineffective. The employment service issued a 1944 handbook, The USES and the Negro Applicant, and required two fourhour training sessions for each of the twenty thousand USES employees nationwide. Yet USES staff members rarely cooperated in these efforts.71 Even when local USES officials conscientiously opposed discriminatory hiring practices, racial segregation and discrimination continued to limit black workers’ access to jobs previously dominated by whites.72 For example, the employment service refused to send candidates to the Western Cartridge Company in East Alton, Illinois, because the company refused to give jobs to African American referrals. Of course, such action was limited by the fact that the federal government would not withdraw war contracts from essential production facilities. In the end, then, the employment service’s enforcement authority, without cooperation from officials in charge of production schedules, left employers to choose their employees from the increasingly limited pool of white candidates. If an

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?” 25%

95

Percent Black Workers, March 1940 Percent Black Workers, January 1945

20%

15%

10%

5%

l Tot a

ce

vice s Go ver nm ent

Ser

Fin an

Tra de

Tot a

Con stru ctio lM n anu Mu niti fac ons tur No ing Ma nm nuf uni ac t tion urin sM g anu fac tur ing Tra nsp ort atio Com n mu nic atio ns Pub lic U titli ties

0

fig. 4. Number of black workers employed in major industry groups expressed as a percentage of total employment in Cook and Du Page counties, March 1940 and January 1945. In the same five years, the black population in the two counties increased from 4.9 to 11.7 percent. USES, Region VI, Division of Program Requirements, Trends in the Employment of Negroes in Cook and DuPage Counties, March 1940 to Date (Chicago: The Division, October 1945), quoted in Dorothy M. Powell, “The Negro Worker in Chicago Industry,” Journal of Business of the University of Chicago 20, no. 1 (January 1947): 23.

employer, like Western Cartridge, were willing to pay high enough wages, it would be able to secure sufficient “acceptable” employees.73 Other factors also limited black workers’ access to jobs monopolized by whites. Black workers generally lived relatively great distances from industrial plants, making those jobs inaccessible to many who did not have access to private transportation, an early example of what social scientists now call a “spatial mismatch.”74 Only 6 percent of all new hires placed by Local USES Office #8 were in the immediate area.75 Most employers did not list openings with Local Office #8. At least 85 percent of Office #8’s referrals were made to employers who had listed openings with other local offices, and some refused to hire workers who lived in particular regions

96

chapter three

of the city.76 In 1944, for example, the Douglas Aircraft plant “had stopped employing people south of Madison Street and hence ruled out the bulk of the Negro community.”77 The USES organized daily “munitions trains” and “share-the-ride” car-pool programs, but their scope was limited.78 Many employers refused to employ black workers referred by the USES, or they employed token numbers of black workers after extended negotiations with the USES. And employers regularly limited black workers’ attempts to move up to more skilled, better paying jobs. “Negroes were almost completely excluded from the fields of machinist and machine operations,” explained Midwest FEPC Director Elmer Henderson after the war. Near the end of the war Henderson surveyed six major Chicago-area employers of skilled and semiskilled machine operators, finding that only one employed even one black worker in a skilled position.79 The labor shortage provided jobs for virtually all black Chicagoans by the end of the war, but higher-level jobs remained largely the province of white workers. Tensions over race and gender also combined to limit black workers’ upward mobility. In 1944, the Industrial Relations Manager at A. N. Steelhammer Company informed the USES that they would not hire black workers “because of attacks on two female employees . . . allegedly by two Negroes,” which had “made the organization like a tinder box.”80 Often white employers and workers worried about the logistics of integrating a workplace, such as providing bathrooms, locker rooms, and lunchrooms for an interracial workforce that included both men and women. When six black women complained to their local USES office that Diebel Die and Manufacturing Co. would not hire them, Diebel’s manager flatly told the federal officials, “The reason for refusal to hire . . . is that the company has no toilet, locker or dressing room facilities for women.” The USES convinced Diebel management to hire the black women and to arrange for the new black workers to use the facilities at a nearby company. But in this case, wartime job gains were clearly not going to outlast the conflict. “Diebel Die has never used women before and will probably not use them after present work has been completed, so that it is inadvisable to build facilities for them.”81 All of these obstacles together translated into placement rates at the South Side USES office lagging behind offices in other parts of the city. Only about 34 percent of the South Side’s referrals actually were placed in jobs. This was below the Chicago area average of about 50 percent of all referrals being placed in jobs.82 Even if individual USES officials were committed to the project of

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

97

racial progress, they generally put the demands of the war first. In a tight labor market, the interests of defense companies often coincided with the needs of black workers—especially those seeking a first industrial job. In some cases, though, USES officials catered to employers’ demands for workers in lower-paying jobs by appealing to black workers’ patriotism. For instance, in September 1943, E. J. O’Keefe of the Chicago Ordnance District’s Labor Relations Office bemoaned the difficulty of finding workers “on account of frozen wages that are too low.” Unless there was some relief, O’Keefe reported, the steel industry projected that its production levels would drop by almost 13 percent by November 1943. “The major heavy steel industries,” he said, “[were] anxious to import Mexicans for laborers but the War Labor Board would not permit it . . . stating that the situation was not that urgent.” Ordnance officers sought to relieve this situation by pressuring the USES to send skilled workers to ordnance plants rather than other jobs with higher wages in order to counteract the shortage in ordnance manufacturing.83 That autumn, then, managers of the four South Side USES offices focused their energies on finding 2,800 workers for fourteen war plants producing “heavy duty tires, shells, heavy field artillery, heavy trucks, ships, barges, chemicals, and castings for airplanes, tanks, and locomotives.” They mounted a media campaign to spread word of the labor shortage with full-page newspaper ads and signs in store windows seeking to convince white and black Chicagoans to “Work for Victory.”84 During interviews USES fieldworkers pressured black applicants to take defense industry positions. Sergeant Walter Bailey, for one, a black soldier who had served in the Pacific Theater from 1941 to 1943, used the sway of his two Bronze Stars and war wounds to convince applicants that they should help produce “what the boys in the front lines need.” Bailey told the Chicago Tribune that “most of the people who come in here looking for jobs are more than willing to take one in essential industry. . . . But some of them don’t seem to know there’s a war on. . . . When they’re slow to react, I just talk to them, and I haven’t lost a case yet.”85 In sum, the USES was best equipped to ensure that black workers would serve employers and the war.

The United States Employment Service and “Race Radicals” Given its deep flaws, the notion that the USES could be an ally in pushing for true racial progress would seem to have been beyond belief. And

98

chapter three

yet people committed to using the local office of the USES to make gains. They did so both because the problems black workers faced in the wartime labor market were so severe, and because they seemed to be on a time clock—no one knew whether the end of the war would bring the end of job opportunities. They also turned to the USES as an ally because doing so brought opportunities otherwise unavailable for white-collar work in the city—fighting for progress through the government institution brought short-term gains to USES officials. And they turned to the USES because the federal employment agency did, in theory at least, provide the hope for a game-changing ally in the long battle over access to good jobs in Chicago. Whatever their reasons, the staff of Local USES Office #8 attempted to fight racial discrimination, acting as the eyes and ears for the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), and working with local groups to battle specific instances of discrimination.86 For instance, when Chicago’s Rockola Manufacturing Corporation originally asked explicitly for “white men,” the employment office did what it was supposed to do—it said the agency could not fill discriminatory orders and, after local officials drew on the influence of their community allies to lobby the company, Rockola took black workers instead. “The latter did their work so well the Rockola folk said they would be happy to use more Negroes.”87 However surprisingly, sometimes boardroom pressure worked. In another, more extended and difficult effort, the employment service staff helped the Negro Labor Relations League open jobs for black workers as delivery driver-salesmen for Chicago’s wholesale bakeries and to integrate the AFL Bakery Drivers’ Union Local 734. An understanding of what made Local Office #8 stand out highlights the ways in which community-based employment activists pressed on with essentially liberal means to open jobs for individual black workers despite evidence that the results of such efforts would be limited. And it shows how, in some cases at least, collaboration with growing, decentralized federal agencies could foster racial advancement. The USES and the NLRL overcame an especially formidable foe. William A. Lee, president of Local 734, also happened to be one of the central figures in the Democratic machine–craft union axis. Head of the Bakery Drivers’ Union from 1916 to 1960, in 1946 Lee became president of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), a post he held until 1984. In 1946, he also allied with the future Mayor Richard J. Daley, heading the labor committee for Daley’s campaign for County Sheriff. When Daley became

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

99

mayor, he named Lee the chair of his Civil Service Commission. Lee remained in Daley’s inner circle throughout the mayor’s long tenure at the head of Chicago’s powerful political machine.88 As president of the Civil Service Commission, Lee oversaw the construction of Daley’s patronage army. When someone holding a meritocratic civil service position would die, Lee would either eliminate the position or “temporarily” fill it with a friend of the mayor “pending examinations that the commission never offered.”89 During World War II, Lee was on the rise politically, and by all rights he controlled whether or not black workers would get jobs as bakery truck drivers-salesmen. The answer had long been, no. For nearly five years, Continental Bakery and the all-white Bakery Drivers’ Union resisted pressure from the NLRL and, during the war, Local USES Office #8, to integrate their workforces.90 When asked if they would hire black drivers, the company and the union passed the buck. In principle, both asserted, they were committed to hiring African Americans. Continental, however, said the union’s seniority rules prevented them from hiring black workers for driver positions, while union officials claimed the bakeries had no openings. On April 5, 1946, Lee and Tom Mahoney of the Bakery Drivers’ Union and Ray Schoessling, Joint Council 25, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen, and Helpers of America, AFL, met with the Mayor’s Commission. Lee claimed the union could do nothing to resolve the situation because all available jobs were going to returning veterans.91 A month later, Jefferson addressed this point in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: “Had the company hired Negroes when they needed drivers, we would not complain now if the men were displaced thru seniority of returning veterans. It is obvious the company did not want [black workers] when the jobs were open, and only because they were Negroes.”92 The League’s reputation as a pressure group willing to resort to rough tactics also created a potential liability for its job crusade. Sensing an opportunity to rid itself of the NLRL, in 1946 the Bakery Drivers’ Union appealed again to the Mayor’s Committee on Human Relations. Lee was confident that the government could not force him to admit African Americans into the union and he knew that the Mayor’s Committee’s first priority was to prevent interracial violence. Therefore, he warned the committee that the NLRL’s campaign would likely cause a violent clash between the Bakery Drivers’ Union and black Chicagoans supporting the League. The League’s pickets and boycotts were controversial, especially to groups like the Mayor’s Committee, during and immediately after the

100

chapter three

war, when memories of the 1919 riot in Chicago and the 1943 riots in Detroit and New York City hung heavy in the air. The dominant form of wartime and postwar racial liberalism sought to ameliorate discrimination and to prevent violence through negotiations. In practice, such polite efforts to achieve racial accommodation all too often served the status quo. And, as in other cities where racial liberalism was the official, generally ineffective creed of local governments, in the long run the failure of racial liberalism by the early 1960s helped to inspire a rising distrust of government as an agent of change. Many black activists recognized the limits of such top-down, polite racial liberalism, even in its heyday. But local activists used their connections to state agencies strategically. Jefferson, for one, was well aware that the union leaders were disingenuously spouting a “principled” commitment to integration. And he was clear that it was the bakeries’ and the union’s intransigence—and not the League’s boycott—that threatened the fragile racial peace in Chicago. “The League,” Jefferson said, “has no intention of intimidating persons not responsible for shaping company policy.” Moreover, he hinted that the protests would continue and that some individuals might get caught up in the heat of the moment. “The League cannot assume responsibility for individual acts.”93 Jefferson employed the tactical use of threatened violence to try to spur the racial liberals on the Commission to action. Whether the Mayor’s Committee would side with the Union or the NLRL was not a given. The deciding factor was that the committee found that the USES had been pressuring local bakeries to hire black men since 1942. In light of this fact, the Mayor’s Committee “informed [the union] that they ought to hire Negroes to drive the bakery trucks.”94 Neither the USES nor the Mayor’s Committee could forcibly integrate Continental and the Bakery Drivers’ Union. On August 21, 1945, the Chicago City Council had passed a municipal fair employment practice ordinance forbidding racial or religious discrimination in hiring decisions by public and private employers. The ordinance, however, was unenforceable.95 But the League had won an essential public relations battle, giving activists hope that the struggle could ultimately be won. The NLRL continued its boycott of Continental until the company caved in March 1947. The victory over Continental paved the way for jobs at numerous other South Side bakeries and with the Seagram Distillers Corporation, as well as the NLRL’s partnership with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in a 1948 job campaign. The alliance between the League’s economic

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

101

“racial radicalism” and the USES and Mayor Committee’s interracial liberalism created a wedge for black workers in a lucrative, previously lilywhite employment sector.96 It was evolutionary change, but it was change.

The Black Craft Economy in War A second arm of the federal government’s labor bureaucracy helped two other important groups in Chicago’s black craft economy, bricklayers and plumbers. “The Negro skilled worker in building construction was almost on his way out during the Great Depression,” Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote in his landmark 1944 study, An American Dilemma, “but now he seems to have gotten a new opportunity.”97 Building trades unions notoriously blocked black workers from joining their unions. Even when they allowed skilled black trades workers provisional union membership, they often prevented African American workers from getting jobs on union worksites.98 In the face of such intransigent racism, some black tradesmen left their craft. Others continued to take nonunion jobs at lower pay and less security, or they worked only for black contractors.99 Black workers’ breakthrough into wartime defense construction, therefore, represented a significant victory in its own right, but the wartime jobs also created further opportunities for African American brick masons and plumbers to promote business and work opportunities for black contractors and tradesmen and to pass their trades to another generation.100 “Duke” Hodges and Lovelyn Evans developed relationships with OPM official Robert Weaver, the foremost black expert on fair employment and the highest-ranking African American in the federal government, as well as with other government and civic leaders. The opening for Evans came when President Roosevelt named to the FEPC Earl Dickerson, Evans’s old acquaintance from her adolescence on the far North Side. “We renewed our acquaintance. I gave him the picture,” she explained. Evans saw herself as a mediator between Dickerson as a representative of the FEPC and restless black workers in Chicago. She recalled meeting with the radical black plumber Edward Doty and his independent black construction trades union, the American Consolidated Trades Council (ACTC). “Everybody said to me, ‘Why are you interested? Your husband has a good job with the telephone company.’ I said, ‘You need assistance. You don’t know how to go about it. Some of you are thinking about being violent. Let’s do it the smart way. I know Earl Dicker-

102

chapter three

son. And then there’s Sidney Hillman. He’s sympathetic. Earl says so.’”101 Evans perhaps inflated her role, but there is no doubt that through FEPC hearings on racial discrimination in the construction unions, which Dickerson arranged with Hillman, even more jobs opened to black bricklayers, and black plumbers like Doty won their first access ever to union work.102 The gains for Doty and the plumbers and steamfitters in the ACTC were limited. Evans helped pressure Earl B. Dickerson and Sidney Hillman to hold FEPC hearings on discrimination in the construction trades. The Chicago hearings finally allowed black workers to secure temporary licenses to work on union plumbing jobs during the war.103 On June 15, 1942, FEPC Executive Secretary Lawrence W. Cramer announced that the committee had ordered the Chicago Steamfitters Protective Association Local 597, and the Chicago Journeyman Plumbers Union Local 130 to employ qualified steamfitters and plumbers on the basis of merit or they would be barred from working on government-financed projects.104 The unions agreed only to allow black steamfitters and plumbers to work for black contractors, “and then only on such buildings as are occupied by colored tenants or owners.” Plumbers Local 130 remained intransigent. Attorney Payton J. Tuohy bristled: “We are not going to upset our established practices for a matter of expediency . . . and it is not even a matter of expediency, but a matter of a minority group trying to crash the gates of union labor.”105 Evans also remembered using her personal position to help win jobs for black bricklayers on the construction of the Great Lakes Naval Station north of Chicago. “At that time I was driving a car,” she remembered later when recalling how she would visit government worksites to pressure supervisors to hire black men. “I always took with me two corner men [bricklayers who bring two walls of brick into exact alignment]—the most skilled.” At the Naval Station, Evans remembered having to talk her way past a guard who “had his bayonet fixed.” When the construction superintendent told her that they were not discriminating and pointed to the many black workers on the job, she said, “Yes, but they are all working as common laborers.” Asked if she knew of any skilled black bricklayers, she said, “I have two in my car . . . from Alabama . . . the best.”106 While Evans used personal connections with powerful federal officials and local civic groups to open jobs for black men, Hodges acted as the link between federal officials and the workers on job sites. In early 1941, with the help of Urban League officials and Weaver’s OPM staff, Hodges helped win jobs for seventy-five to one hundred twenty-five black ma-

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

103

sons on the extension of the huge powder plant which ran for seven miles between Jeffersonville and Charleston, Indiana, along Highway 62 just across the border from Louisville, Kentucky.107 The victory in Charleston was an isolated triumph, but Hodges continued to fight for black brick mason positions at job after job. He returned to the Chicago area to battle for jobs for black workers in a powder plant in Joliet. “Discrimination there was so rank,” he remembered, “that only a few [black workers] were used digging ditches.” Hodges appealed to Thomas H. O’Donnell, president of Bricklayers Local 21, and “after outwitting objections” in Joliet, Hodges and two other black masons were put to work.108 Hodges and Evans had tapped into a center of federal authority with strong Chicago connections. Robert Weaver, an economist who served as advisor on “Negro affairs” for the Department of Interior, the Public Works Administration, and the United States Housing Authority in the 1930s, had helped secure jobs for black workers on public housing projects, including the Ida B. Wells Homes. Weaver’s connections to local Chicago activists and interracial liberal circles grew stronger during his wartime efforts to open jobs for black workers on defense construction projects. And when he left the federal government in 1944, he returned to Chicago to direct the Mayor’s Committee on Human Relations. He provided a strong liberal ally for employment activists. Weaver was not the only Chicago-affiliated representative in the OPM. Joseph Keenan, Hillman’s labor consultant in the OPM, was a Chicago native. A second-generation Irish Chicagoan whose father was a leader in the Teamsters, Keenan came up through Local 134 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and in 1937 became the Secretary of the CFL.109 In 1940 and 1941, Keenan helped open construction jobs in suburban and rural locations as the U.S. military built munitions plants around the country. The increase in the Chicago area was dramatic. In 1939, no ordnance plants existed in metropolitan Chicago, but the Army’s Office of Ordnance built manufacturing plants costing $175,000,000 and employing eighty thousand workers by 1943.110 In the Chicago Ordnance District, Keenan and the leaders of the local AFL construction unions ensured that the majority of the Illinois construction jobs went to trades workers from Chicago rather than workers living near the building sites.111 Consequently, thousands of Chicago building trade workers flooded into towns like Joliet and Kankakee.112 The odds seemed to be stacked against black workers who wanted jobs on these massive projects. Traditionally, black workers had been frozen

104

chapter three

out of construction work, and the racially exclusive AFL trades unions controlled approximately 95 percent of the federal jobs nationwide.113 But the OPM officials broke through in negotiations with the AFL construction unions. In May 1941, Weaver sent Keenan to work with the local OPM representative in Chicago, Mark F. Hurley, in negotiations with construction contractors in the Chicago area. They first met with George F. Bent, personnel manager of Sanderson and Porter, the construction company building a plant at Elwood, Illinois, just south of Joliet. Until then, the 115 black workers, out of 5,700 total employees, “had been common laborers.” That same day the OPM representatives met with H. F. Anthony and T. W. Piper of Stone and Webster Construction Company. CFL President Patrick Sullivan instructed all business agents to send all black union members to the Joliet Building Trades Council for clearance for the two jobs, and L. A. Rogers of the Joliet ISES agreed to clear black union workers for the jobs. The group sent “over a hundred Negro bricklayers to work . . . [as well as] Negro carpenters, electricians, painters, plumbers, and steamfitters.”114 Bricklayers would make $1.62½ an hour, carpenters $1.50 an hour, and common laborers 90 cents an hour.115 When OPM officials opened jobs for black workers on federal job sites across the country, Hodges and Evans helped ensure that black workers from the Chicago area would benefit. During the war, Hodges was the foreman for black bricklayers on a National Defense hospital constructed in the city.116 And black Chicago bricklayers worked on a defense housing project for the Bethlehem Steel Company’s Sparrows Point plant in Baltimore; a magnesium plant in Las Vegas, New Mexico; an arms plant in Pasco, Washington; and ordnance plants in Utah, Hawaii, and Alaska.117 Zelma Potts and Henry Madison, “two of Chicago’s ace bricklayers,” took jobs on the Las Vegas site and used their positions to extend opportunities to other black bricklayers. “Since then,” the Defender reported, they “have been instrumental in putting to work approximately 35 others, among whom were men from New York City.”118 This national coalition of activists and administrators broke down longstanding racial barriers. In 1941, Hodges remembered that white and black workers competed for jobs with memories of Depression-era unemployment fresh in their minds. With “hundreds of war plants in progress,” and “a shortage of bricklayers,” he noted, “there was a world of prejudice, fear, and discrimination existing most everywhere.” Hodges concluded, “Our brother white masons did not believe the Depression was really over.”119 During the war, however, at least some of Hodges’ white colleagues

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

105

changed their attitudes. In a 1943 union election, over two hundred bricklayers, only four of whom were black, elected Hodges as their steward on a job building an aluminum production plant in Chicago’s western suburbs, setting what the Chicago Defender called “a new and commendable precedent in Chicago labor union management.”120 Again, in 1944, the “overwhelming majority” of bricklayers working on the Altgeld Homes public housing project on Chicago’s far South Side elected Hodges to be their steward, despite having only three black masons in the group.121

The USES and Reconversion Defender columnist Ben Burns described the mixed emotions that the end of World War II brought to African Americans in cities like Chicago. The war was over and “thousands swarmed Bronzeville’s busiest intersection at 47th Street and South Parkway where servicemen gaily kissed passing girls to mark the joyous day. There was singing and dancing in the streets.” But, he wrote, “the Southside . . . perhaps was quieter than most cities. After the first bursts of enthusiasm, the crowds settled down to sober contemplation of the future.”122 Burns may have been painting an anxious picture of postwar fears about ongoing racial exclusion to match his views as the committed Communist white editor of the Defender.123 But other media outlets reflected the same view. The Chicago Bee, for instance, similarly noted that news of V-E Day “was communicated through the streets in the subdued voices and understanding smiles of people who share in a common victory through sacrifice and suffering, and who expect to sacrifice and suffer more.”124 Local USES Office #8 remained an important community institution during the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Mass layoffs and returning veterans raised popular fears that demobilization would bring a repeat of the economic downturn after World War I. Fearful black workers turned to the local USES office for jobs and for unemployment benefits to tide them over between jobs. Thousands of black workers stood to lose their temporary war jobs. African Americans were especially vulnerable because they had secured jobs in areas that would suffer the greatest postwar cutbacks and job competition: semi-skilled factory work in metals, chemicals, and rubber production. Black workers and organized labor more generally struggled to influence the direction of the peacetime economy. In addition to the more familiar efforts to secure permanent

106

chapter three

full and fair employment legislation, a broad coalition of labor and civil rights organizations backed legislation to block conservative U.S. senators and business leaders who wanted to return the USES to individual states’ control.125 The Defender declared, “The time for pussyfooting and buckpassing is over. . . . If Negro America could attain this unity to win war jobs, it is all the more imperative that this unity be strengthened in a new campaign for peace jobs.”126 Black activists and workers seeking a revitalized mass movement faced at least two serious hurdles. First, they found it was immeasurably more difficult to convince employers to end discriminatory hiring practices during a time of labor surplus. “To expect all employers to act on a bases of fair play,” the Bee warned, “is wishful thinking.”127 Second, they found that the conservative “southern bloc” of U.S. senators was determined to reduce the federal government’s intervention in business practices. “The bile being spumed by addled-brained [Mississippi Senator] Bilbo” translated into seemingly insurmountable obstacles to a progressive legislative agenda.128 Black workers rightly worried about the end of wartime production levels and the rise of a reactionary Congress. The USES became a focal point in both black workers’ difficult search for work during the reconversion and in political battles over what influence labor and liberal organizations would have in the peacetime economy. As early as August 1944, the Chicago Bee warned black Chicagoans to take an interest in congressional hearings on demobilization. “We strongly urge as between federal and ‘states rights’ demobilization planning and controls that this central planning and centralized control be under the aegis of the federal government rather than ‘legalize’ the prejudicial ‘race’ differentials that would ultimately prevail if left to the states.”129 Indeed, the return of the USES to state-level control made it more difficult for workers in the South and North to push for effective government job training and placement programs into the 1970s. The threat of unemployment hung in the air. “The most important word in the English language today is RECONVERSION,” shouted the Chicago Bee in September 1945.130 After V-E Day (May 8, 1945), employers began cutting black and white workers from their payrolls, heightening anxieties about the postwar world. “Both to the 5,500,000 Negro workers on jobs today and more than one million Negro servicemen,” wrote the Chicago Defender editors in May 1945, “the prediction that 1,500,000 workers will become unemployed within the next few months is an ill omen of days to come. . . . Already the scythe of unemployment is

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

107

striking down colored war workers. Here in Chicago the big Studebaker plant which has been making B-17 engines and which had a great number of Negro workers, has been ordered completely shut down by the War Department.”131 After V-J Day, employers cut thousands more black and white workers from their payrolls. By September 2, 1945, over 92,000 Chicagoans had been laid off from war work.132 Between November 1945 and the end of January 1946 Chicago’s unemployment rate increased by 8 percent as veterans returned, the Christmas rush rose and subsided, and workers refused to take jobs that offered only a fraction of the wages they earned during the war.133 Postwar reconversion was a mixed bag for African-American workers. For most workers, black and white, fears of postwar economic disruptions were worse than the reality. As a 1947 WMC report found, “there was no tendency for Negro workers to be released in larger numbers proportionately than other workers. In the 678 companies reporting to the WMC in Cook and DuPage Counties, total black employment declined from 11.2 to 10.8 percent of the total.”134 On the other hand, between 1944 and 1945, the percentage of black workers in unskilled jobs increased from 67 to 72 percent, and by 1948 the Illinois Interracial Commission reported that the Illinois State Employment Service and private employment services increasingly honored employers’ requests for white workers.135 An individual worker’s fate during reconversion largely depended on where he or she worked. Overall, workers in Chicago fared better than those in cities like Mobile, Alabama, or Oakland, California, which relied on a single war industry.136 Within Chicago as well, workers’ prospects differed greatly depending on their skill level and the sector of the economy in which they worked. Few workers in food production and steel were laid off, while those who had taken jobs in the airplane or tank factories had had a flash in the pan but struggled to find steady work of the same quality in the peacetime economy. During the war, some workers had considered the risk of taking defense jobs when they weighed their options. Todd Tate, who worked in a packinghouse at the time of the war, remembered that he thought about getting work at a defense plant, but his wife had convinced him that he would be laid off after the war.137 Indeed, the hundreds of black workers who had found jobs in skilled and semiskilled capacities faced the deepest cuts because, as one federal official noted, “most of this advance . . . was in aircraft manufacturing which, unfortunately, is now non-existent in the Chicago area.” Although black workers “were heavily concentrated

108

chapter three

in iron and steel, food processing, clothing, and railroads, none of which were seriously affected by the end of the war,” the skilled positions in the aircraft, tank, and radar industries, where “Negroes obtained the highest wages and the greatest qualitative advancement,” were to be “completely abandoned at the end of the war.”138 For workers who had earned the quick buck in the defense industries the prospect of losing a federal ally in the transition to a peacetime economy was daunting. Although white and black workers both lost jobs during reconversion, black workers faced disproportionate unemployment in the postwar period. At the beginning of 1946, approximately 101,500 people were unemployed in Chicago, one-fifth of whom were black.139 In 1946, the general manager of Chicago Surface Lines told FEPC Regional Director Elmer Henderson, “During the war period we had to hire almost any one who could possibly qualify to operate a car. As soon as V-J Day came we knew there would be a drastic change in employment prospects and in the volume and character of our service needs.” Thus they returned to the same hiring policies they had followed before the war. They had hired 643 black men, and 231 had been “discharged or allowed to resign.” Ninety-five of the 231 had resigned.140 In the two months after Japan surrendered on August 15, African American unemployment in Chicago increased 16.7 percent. Chicago saw a 13.5 percent increase in unemployment for all workers.141 On August 25, FEPC Regional Administrator Elmer Henderson reported to the Chicago Defender that most of the 56,000 black workers in war industries—including 5,800 at Dodge, fifteen hundred to two thousand at Buick, one thousand at Douglas, nine hundred at Pressed Steel, and three hundred at Foote Bros. Gear & Machine Company—and an additional fifteen thousand African Americans working for federal agencies in the Chicago area were scheduled to be laid off by Christmas.142 Laid-off black workers came by the thousands to Local USES Office #8. “In all cities,” the Defender’s Ben Burns wrote, “United States Employment Service offices in Negro communities were the scenes of long lines of men and women who had been given notice that their jobs were over. . . . The growing army of unemployed is bound to increase racial tensions bringing a disastrous repetition of the bloody riots which followed World War I.”143 Burns was likely being purposefully dramatic, and, thankfully, the riots did not come, but returning veterans and laid-off black workers indeed grew frustrated as they tried to claim what they saw as their rightful dividends for wartime sacrifices. In August 1945, 3,200 veterans sought jobs with the local USES, but the employment service could

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

109

place only about 300.144 About two thousand additional civilians visited the USES office every day after layoffs at Dodge, Douglas Aircraft, Buick Aircraft, Pressed Steel Car Co., and Carnegie Illinois Steel. This amounted to a 75 percent increase in job seekers since the cutbacks began.145 Postwar unemployment did increase, but it never reached the levels people had feared during the war. Nonetheless, for black workers, especially black women, the quality of jobs available decreased markedly. Black workers in the North and the South found that local officials were determined “to get Negroes back into the kitchens and other menial jobs at substandard wages.”146 In Chicago, employers no longer faced tight labor markets and reverted to discriminatory hiring practices. According to a special USES study, in the first half of February 1946 the service had received 3,812 “discriminatory orders,” asking for a certain kind of worker of a particular race, religion, or sex.147 This was hardly surprising given the wartime record of discrimination, but it spotlighted how little things had changed in domestic race relations during a war against Nazi racism. In 1947, Fisk University sociologist Charles S. Johnson wrote, “The U.S. Employment Service in its local administration continues in most cities . . . to accept and comply with discriminatory job orders of employers, and even where official government policy is against discrimination it is still possible for petty officials in localities to accomplish a discriminatory end by classification and referral.”148 Moreover, black workers had not solved the spatial mismatch. As the director of the Chicago Metropolitan Area USES offices reported, the concentration of the black population meant that the overall “figures on discriminatory orders tend to understate the extent of discrimination. In local offices which are not near locations where Negroes reside, the question of discrimination generally does not arise, since white workers are the only ones that can be referred. . . . Even in these areas of Chicago the extent of discrimination is understated, inasmuch as many employers do not specify race in their orders but in practice reject most of the non-white referrals.”149 The USES had jobs to offer, but unemployed black workers found the majority of the USES listings unappealing. As of September 21, 1945, the eighteen branches of the Chicago-area USES offices had a total of 59,656 unfilled listings, but the majority of these were in unskilled, low-paid positions in food processing, iron and steel, wholesale and retail trade, service, and utilities. Of nearly 60,000 unfilled positions, 30.1 percent paid less than 65 cents per hour; 36.3 percent paid 65–79 cents; 17.2 percent paid 80–99 cents; 8.6 percent paid between one dollar and $1.24; and 5.4 per-

110

chapter three

cent paid more than $1.25 per hour.150 The vast majority of postwar jobs would mean a step down for black workers who had held jobs in the defense industries. Defender columnist Ben Burns mocked a “typical” USES job listing: “Help wanted—Low pay. Long hours. Little opportunity for advancement. Permanent postwar employment. Negroes only need apply. Call United States Employment Service, 47th and South Parkway.”151 As of September 15, Gist reported only 606 jobs listed with the USES for skilled or semi-skilled workers, which paid between seventy-five cents and $1.40 an hour.152 Instead of “fantastic high-paying postwar jobs ballyhooed in the daily press,” Burns wrote, “Negro unemployed were faced with a flat ultimatum that they take menial, unskilled work paying as low as 50 cents an hour or else lose all their unemployment compensation.” USES personnel interviewer Estelle Arnold admitted there were few jobs available satisfactory to workers who had moved into semiskilled and skilled industrial work during the war. “There are always more applicants than jobs,” she said. A “typical sampling” of jobs available at the USES included, “Food processing, 500 jobs, $30 week. Power sewing machine factory, 75 jobs, 50 cents hour. Maids, kitchen workers, service work, unlimited jobs, $88 per month. Laundry workers, $30 week. Cleaning and pressing factory, 55 cents hour.” People who had been making one dollar to $1.75 per hour were being offered sixty to ninety cents per hour. Gist told the Defender that he knew of “some 3,000 job openings a day compared to 2,000 applicants, but [he] admitted almost all were in unskilled work in foundries, steel mills, hotels, and railroads.”153 Black workers perceived the jobs available to them immediately after the war as an insult. Margaret Smith of 5037 Prairie Avenue had been a machinist at the Dodge plant, making $1.15 an hour. After V-E day, she was given a choice of two jobs—one in a sewing machine factory at fifty cents an hour, another in a canning factory, also at fifty cents an hour. “I refused them both. By the time I pay carfare, buy lunch, pay my insurance and income tax, there would be nothing left,” Smith said. John Jordan of 4049 South Dearborn had worked since 1941 as a fitter at Pressed Steel for $1.04 an hour. “How can I live on 60 cents an hour with prices as high as they are?” he asked. “If prices go down, I’ll take a job for 60 cents an hour. But right now I got two kids. I want a mechanic’s job. That’s the kind of work I can do, and I’m not starting on anything like hotel work now.” Monroe Warren of 5064 South Calumet Avenue had been at Foote Bros. Gear & Machine Company for three years as a lathe operator, making

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

111

one dollar an hour. He described his frustration with the USES: “I have been at this office about ten times,” he said. “They offer me some little old jobs that don’t amount to anything—working for Campbell Soup for 60 cents an hour. I want something better.” Felix Steel, 4714 South Michigan Avenue, worked at Chrysler Dodge for fourteen months as a heat treater for $1.17 per hour. “My God, I can’t live on 60 cents an hour. I’ve got four dependents. I want a machinist’s job, too.”154 Michael Mann, Executive Secretary of the CIO’s Chicago Industrial Union Council, told the Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations in September 1945 that “most of these jobs were either in the service trades or in low-wage industries and . . . the most they would offer as recompense would be $30 a week. . . . [That is] a wage [that] could not maintain any kind of economic standard or purchasing power.”155 Loren Morris, a former spot welder at International Harvester, agreed. “Anything less than $45 a week,” he told the Defender, “would put me in a hole.”156 To black workers facing the reality of continued employment discrimination in the postwar period, the reconversion to a peacetime economy represented a step backward. Peacetime brought anxiety, the Defender reported, “to the thousands [of black workers] who want to live as decently now as they did during the war.”157 Many black workers felt they had earned the right to federal support while they “shopped around” for good jobs. Under federal rules job seekers could refuse to take “unsuitable” jobs and collect unemployment compensation without penalty, but it was up to the USES to decide what was “suitable.” State Director of Labor Robert L. Gordon ruled after V-J Day that “suitable” jobs could pay up to 15 percent less than what the worker had previously earned.158 Still, black workers fought to maintain federal control over the employment service because, as bad as things might have been in late 1945, black workers feared the loss of benefits if control over job placement and unemployment compensation returned to the states’ hands.159 Workers especially prized their right—under the rules of the federal USES—to receive unemployment insurance for a short time while they sought work “commensurate with their skills.”160 At the same time, to conservative legislators, growing African American unemployment, and many black workers’ refusal to take pay cuts and lower-level jobs after the war, reinforced their belief that the state employment service and unemployment compensation needed to be returned to the hands of the individual states. Fearing that these benefits would disappear if the employment service returned to the states’ hands, a national coalition of labor groups, in-

112

chapter three

cluding the CIO and the AFL, as well as the NAACP, the Urban League, and many other black, white, and interracial civic organizations pressured Congress to extend federal control over the employment service indefinitely. As early as 1944, the National Urban League promised to support legislation for a permanent fair employment practices committee at the federal, state, and local levels, and to help prevent the USES from being returned to state control. Furthermore, League officials called for the integration of USES offices in the South.161 The press captured the tenor of these battles. While the Chicago Defender condemned “the reactionaries in Congress . . . the ‘States Rights Boys’ . . . whooping it up to return employment to the states immediately,” the Chicago Tribune flogged the AFL for “[throwing] its weight behind communistic labor leaders, federal job holders, and the apostles of collectivism.”162 By September 1945, the progressive coalition had convinced President Truman to request that Congress delay the return of the employment service to states’ hands until June 30, 1947, because an immediate change would “cause unnecessary hardship to workers and veterans . . . [and] slow down the entire process of reconversion.”163 In the end, though, the federal USES was swept away by the rising tide of conservative congressional power. The employment service returned to the control of the individual states on November 11, 1946. Black workers ultimately lost their access to unemployment benefits, and to a local office of the federal bureaucracy, as the USES fell victim to the decidedly conservative character of the reconversion to a peacetime economy.164

Uneven Prospects for the Postwar Era A worker’s race, gender, and skills, of course, profoundly influenced the kinds of jobs he or she could get during the war, and the challenges he or she faced in maintaining economic stability after the war. But, in order to understand how an individual’s social position influenced her economic prospects, it is essential to understand the specific kinds of connections workers forged to various urban institutions. Each of the main actors in this chapter took an idiosyncratic path to wartime and postwar opportunities. And those various paths help explain the rise of social and economic differences within postwar Chicago, differences that would have profound political importance as black Chicagoans sought to counter the effects of segregation and discrimination in the postwar decades. Black Chicago-

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

113

ans’ relationships to the federal government during and immediately after World War II sustained the position of the city’s black craft economy, extending a politics of economic nationalism and community-building into an era dominated by integrationist liberalism. Historian Andrew Edmund Kersten has dismissed the bricklayers’ successes on federal construction sites as mere token gains. “Although NDAC press releases bragged about the occasional Weaver success (in the Midwest he helped to get jobs for 150 black carpenters in St. Louis Missouri, and three hundred black bricklayers in Indiana),” argues Kersten, “these had little impact on overall African-American defense employment.”165 Measured in these terms Local Office #8 and the bricklayers’ alliance with Weaver’s OPM seem like well-intentioned but insignificant local efforts to push back a wave of discrimination. But the efforts mattered because they both reflected and helped shape black Chicago’s political culture, with its pragmatic emphasis on economic issues, the disproportionate influence of skilled workers, and the importance of connections to the state. The bricklayers’ efforts also had more direct and durable implications for individual workers. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman’s secretary of labor, Lewis Schwellenbach, asked black Chicago bricklayer J. Edgar “Duke” Hodges to help meet the nationwide shortage of bricklayers. Hodges had helped secure jobs for black bricklayers during the war, and he jumped at the opportunity to promote further opportunities after the war. “I took unto myself the toughest job of my life,” Hodges recounted, “to help young Negroes become bricklayers.” He became the president of the school where Bricklayers’ Local 21 ran an apprenticeship program for black veterans. Many workers were reluctant at first—“fresh from the war, a pocket full of money, [they] laughed at me.” But after Hodges made clear that they could make the princely sum of $1.37½ per hour, “they came in droves.”166 Over the next few years, the number of black bricklayers in Local 21, the largest local in the country, increased from about one hundred fifty to over five hundred. He was “instrumental in bringing to Chicago scores of other brick masons and building workers from other parts of the country, especially the South, where advantages for training in this important branch of labor are greater than in the North and West,” in the words of Defender columnist Albert G. Barnett.167 By bringing southern black bricklayers to Chicago, Hodges helped introduce another generation to the city’s skilled trades, but with mixed results. Many of these bricklayers became community leaders. Hodges, for example, led twenty-one volunteers from the Brotherhood Club who

114

chapter three

built the Beth Eden Baptist Church at 111th Street and Loomis Avenue in 1949. At the same time, he was a foreman of a group of black masons working on the Dearborn Homes Project.168 Others in the Brotherhood Club helped build, and became civic leaders in, enclaves of black singlefamily-homeowners.169 Yet this was not a story of short-term triumph over racism in the building trades unions. Not until 1971 would black bricklayers slate candidates for elected offices in Local 21.170 And they only achieved that level of participation in the union after self-consciously Black Power–oriented labor activists mounted a multifaceted attack on discrimination in the union apprenticeship programs.171 Duke Hodges’ generation of black bricklayers continued to work with and provide leadership for new groups of black masons into the Black Power era. In 1971, for example, the Black Power–oriented Concerned Black Bricklayers slated Sherman Todd as their candidate for recording secretary. Todd had been a member of the Bricklayers international union for nineteen years and had been recording secretary of BMPIU Local 3 in Montgomery, Alabama. He was a World War II veteran who graduated from Tuskegee in 1952 and had served as a public school teacher for three years. And he was a community leader as treasurer of the 116th and Elizabeth Streets Block Club in a far South Side neighborhood of single-family brick homes.172 He carried many of the formative experiences, institutions, and social networks—which had given Duke Hodges and the other masons in the Brotherhood Club their base—into the Black Power era. Though the activists fighting for equity in the Bricklayers’ Union and construction industry in the late 1960s and 1970s pursued more confrontational forms of activism, people like Hodges and Todd reflect the striking and largely forgotten continuity that characterized black workers’ long-term struggle to open good construction jobs to individual trades workers in the twentieth century. Lovelyn J. Evans followed another route to postwar opportunity as personnel counselor at Campbell Soup Company. She became one of many people working from the inside of Chicago’s industries to try to give individual workers a chance. Evans thought of her work as a personnel counselor as an extension of her efforts as a wartime employment activist, when she helped black bricklayers and plumbers break down walls to work. Evans started as a clerk during World War II but was thinking of giving up the position because, as she stated bluntly, “I didn’t like working in factories.” But Elmer Henderson, head of the Midwest district of the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), convinced Evans

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

115

to keep the job as a service to the larger black community. Henderson, Evans remembered, “told me that he thought that I owed it to myself and to the race to take this job where they never had colored before. It took me three weeks to decide. . . . I took it, because I would be a pioneer and open some fields for some other colored people.”173 During her twenty years at Campbell Soup, Evans saw the proportion of black employees increase from 25 to 50 percent, and she helped some black workers move up the job ladder to positions “ranging from mechanics, electricians, and supervisors, to high secretarial positions.”174 As a personnel counselor, Evans saw her role as someone who not only opened the door to a job but who also worked to uplift the workers she had hired. She provided advice to help them deal with personal problems, improve their job performance, and become fiscally responsible. “Scolding and cajoling, she made them take lessons in reading and writing and set up night classes for advanced studies. Her pet peeve was high interest loans in which the hapless victims were in virtual slavery to the loan sharks. . . . Though a few of [the workers] grumbled about her authoritative [sic] ways and whiplash temper, it made her feel good when some would come and tell her that they were starting to buy homes.”175 Evans sought to foster individual opportunities by working from the inside, and she exemplified the much maligned, but persistently important, racial uplift mode of employment activism. And she won renown for her work. In the 1959, prominent black journalist Roi Ottley celebrated her service in a Chicago Tribune article, writing that she had “contributed significantly to the progress of the South Side community.”176 In 1965, Mayor Richard J. Daley inducted Evans into the city’s Senior Citizens Hall of Fame.177 Local USES Office #8 staff members William E. Gist and Era Bell Thompson point to the growing base of civil service work and black businesses that helped build the “middle-class wards” of Chicago. After the war, Gist continued to serve as manager of the Illinois State Employment Service office in the Loop until 1955, when he took a position as the regional chief of relocation with the federal Home and Housing Finance Agency (HHFA). In 1962, he became the deputy regional director of urban renewal for the HHFA. Gist used his government service to become a prominent member of the black South Side elite. Gist and his wife, Dorothy A. James of Washington, D.C., were leading members of the Hyde Park Community Conference, working to create an integrated, middle-class community in the shadow of the University of Chicago. He was also a leader in the longer-term history of parallel black business

116

chapter three

development. Gist was on the board of directors of the Peoples Co-op Credit Union, 47th Street and Michigan Avenue, which was founded in 1947, and by 1962, had grown to be the nineteenth largest credit union of the 1,700 in Illinois.178 Thompson became an even more prominent figure in the Black Metropolis. Immediately after the war, she won a Newberry Library Fellowship, with which she produced the autobiography American Daughter about her youth in North Dakota and her transition to Chicago. In 1951, she became associate editor of Ebony magazine, and in Africa, Land of My Fathers, reported on the burgeoning anticolonial movements on that continent. In 1964, the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company named Thompson international editor.179 The openings that Joseph Jefferson and the NLRL won with the help of the USES during the war solidified the group’s commitment to economic nationalism and boycott politics. At the same time, their wartime success helped NLRL leaders foster their careers and reinforced their commitment to working with government allies to win influence. The NLRL’s wartime story complicates the twentieth-century narratives of black liberalism and black radicalism. Jefferson, Sardon, and the NLRL remained “liberal” actors in the sense that they turned to the state as a potential ally and in that they continued to believe in the significance of securing opportunities for individual workers. But they energized a raceconscious, pragmatic liberalism that had as much room for protest on the streets as for backroom negotiations. An examination of the ways that individual black workers from a wide variety of backgrounds took advantage of wartime opportunity reveals how important relationships to local institutions were in the everyday efforts to make lives in the city. This history is important on a broader level as well. Historians have concentrated on how the fight for fair employment—a principal goal of the “Double V” campaign for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home—energized black Americans’ civil rights consciousness. At the same time the fight for fair employment also invigorated and revised a specific brand of economic “race consciousness” that remained central to the vision of the Black Metropolis during and after World War II. It became increasingly clear that the Black Metropolis would offer uneven benefits to its residents, a harsh reality that exacerbated social inequalities and political tensions within black Chicago. The unprecedented migration of black Southerners to Chicago

“will ‘our people’ be any better off?”

117

between 1942 and the mid-1970s, combined with unrelenting racial segregation and discrimination, created overwhelming pressures that virtually ruled out the possibility of realizing the dream of an independent Black Metropolis that could provide a base for equality both between the races and within black communities. Instead, the story of World War II and postwar black Chicago is the story of escalating political tensions both between white and black Chicagoans, and between black Chicagoans of different social statuses. The political culture of postwar black Chicago was, obviously, profoundly reshaped by battles along the color line. But it also developed in relation to the growing physical distances and social disparities between African Americans in a sprawling Black Metropolis.

chapter four

A Decent Place to Live The Postwar Housing Shortage

T

he deep and persistent housing crisis in postwar black Chicago demanded a furious response. Families were dying regularly in fires that could easily have been prevented, or, in some cases, fires set by landlords looking for insurance money. Absentee landlords let their buildings crumble, and even as they demanded their rent on time their residents suffered daily indignities and shattering horrors—overcrowded conditions fostered the spread of illness, stairways collapsed, toddlers fell from broken decks.1 As early as 1940, black sociologist Horace R. Cayton judged that Chicago was “Juggling ‘Black Dynamite’” by maintaining segregated neighborhoods with high rents and dangerous housing. “Negroes have been passive in situations where other groups would have been resentful and articulate in their discontent,” Cayton wrote, but “the possibilities for friction and indeed for riot are certainly present.”2 Conditions only grew worse during and after the war as tens of thousands of newcomers from the South arrived while the boundaries of the segregated Black Belt expanded much too slowly to accommodate them.3 Escape was nearly impossible. There were virtually no vacancies in segregated black neighborhoods. Until 1948, it was legal for white homeowners to sign agreements, known as racial restrictive covenants, which bound them not to sell or rent to “Negroes.”4 After the Supreme Court found racial covenants unconstitutional, a new and destructive process of neighborhood change began. When a black family found a white person willing to sell or rent to them, or when they won access to previously all-white housing projects, white people either fled the neighborhood or gathered in mobs to shout expletives and throw bricks and explosives at

a decent place to live

119

the newcomers. The postwar period has been memorialized as an “era of hidden violence” that buttressed the walls of the ghetto.5 Black Chicagoans faced a dual private housing market that depended upon rampant discrimination and separate systems of credit for white and black people. Banks refused to give black house buyers conventional mortgages, and, with the help of real estate agents, home sellers concocted a system of contract sales. The buyer placed a small down payment on the property and agreed to pay monthly installments and cover the costs of upkeep until the “contract” was paid off. If the buyer missed one payment, the contract holder could revoke the contract without notice. This system of selling and buying homes, essentially on layaway, leeched wealth from thousands of black families headed by men and women with steady jobs who had bought into the American dream of homeownership.6 Liberal politicians and reformers were very well aware of the housing crisis, but they did little to address it. In 1944, Cayton collaborated with his friend and fellow sociologist Harry Walker on a highly critical report for the federal government’s National Housing Agency, diagnosing the root causes of suffering in black neighborhoods.7 “In Chicago,” he and Walker argued, “where every single available living unit regardless of condition is used,” overcrowding caused deterioration of residential buildings for all black Chicagoans. “From just one form of deterioration . . . fires, it was estimated that 1,000 persons were driven out doors in a month [in December 1943].” Most galling, the main cause of the fires was not some impersonal force such as the age or building materials of the housing; rather, “the principal cause of these recent fires can, citizens say, be laid to the fact that absentee landlords through their agents have failed to make proper repairs on buildings, and a great number of grossly underpaid and decrepit janitors are employed in responsible duties of attending to furnaces in large apartment buildings.”8 Sixty to seventy thousand black southerners came to the city during the war, making a difficult situation even worse, but the federal government did little to address the problems. “The NHA has failed . . . because of its deference to the principle of residential segregation.”9 The limits of federal efforts to ameliorate the housing crisis for black workers were clear. Cayton’s disillusionment with policymakers peaked not long after the war, when he served on a coroner’s jury charged with investigating the causes of the deaths of ten people in an apartment fire. On October 10, 1947, four women and six children between the ages of one and thirty-seven died in a fire on Chicago’s West Side.10 All ten victims were

120

chapter four

black residents of an overcrowded apartment building at 940–942 West Ohio Street. Nine died of “extensive second degree burns,” while one, a four-year-old boy, suffocated. Sadly, the fire in itself was not a unique event. What was unique was that Cayton and the other members of the coroner’s jury decided that the fire was a multiple homicide. “We charge,” the coroner’s report read, “person or persons unknown with murder by arson.” The report blamed “the unbelievably shocking conditions” in the building, with violations of safety and municipal codes, for the murders. “The Jury cannot stress too strongly its belief that there would have been no deaths in this tenement had the operator had even the slightest of feelings of human decency toward his tenants.”11 In the end, the city failed to act on the jury’s recommendations to reform the city’s enforcement of housing codes.12 The forces of law and order took the threat of riots more seriously than the threats the fires posed. During the coroner jury’s inquest, Police Captain George Homer warned Cayton not to probe too deeply into the underlying causes of the repeated fires in black neighborhoods. The West Side “was ready to explode in a riot,” Homer declared, and Cayton’s questions only fed people’s anger.13 City officials, the real estate industry, and most of the media did everything they could to keep the truth about housing discrimination from coming out. All the while, frustration built within black Chicago, where the truth was all too evident. Here was a stark example of how liberal race relations failed to address the racial crisis. According to the dominant model of race relations, race leaders like Cayton were to act as advocates for black Chicagoans within the white-dominated halls of power. Through education and interracial cooperation, liberals represented by groups like the Mayor’s Committee on Human Relations, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the many interracial social work agencies in the city avowed that racial accommodation and progress for black Chicagoans could be achieved. But Cayton ran up against the hard fact that no amount of voluntary reconciliation sufficed. He had lost his optimism by the late 1940s. “In the five years following the war,” he later remembered, “my world collapsed. . . . I felt that the dynamic opportunity which the conflict had provided for dark peoples around the world had been dissipated.”14 In 1948, Cayton cut his ties in Chicago and moved to New York City, disillusioned with the prospects of meaningful state action against segregation and its effects, and turning away from a sociological to a psychological approach to the problems of race and racism.15

a decent place to live

121

The battles against segregation and its effects were deeply disillusioning. But it would be misguided to conclude that black Chicagoans consequently did nothing to shape their housing prospects in the postwar period other than fighting for mere survival. Black Chicagoans channeled their fury into resolute struggles to build decent places to live behind the walls of segregation. For too many people the only option was to take whatever housing they could find and hope for the best. But even they gained valuable experience and nurtured local community networks that would be key as black Chicagoans fought to change the politics of housing and urban development in the 1960s and 1970s. The relatively lucky few did somewhat better in the postwar period. They invested hard-won earnings and sweat equity in maintaining their own individual homes amidst the deterioration of their neighborhoods. In some remarkable cases, they even literally built communities of single-family houses on previously vacant land on the edges of the city’s gradually expanding black communities. In doing so, they defended themselves and their communities from the dangers of conflict along the color line and acted upon the positive commitment to strengthening the Black Metropolis. It is essential to avoid dismissing the persistent, if necessarily limited, struggles to ameliorate the effects of segregation as merely treating the symptoms of a more radical problem. The everyday struggle for decent housing must instead be seen as part and parcel of the larger battle against segregation. When reformers and local residents worked to secure decent communities for themselves and their neighbors, they were engaged in a struggle to shape the conditions under which they would live. Certainly, the struggles of the late 1940s and 1950s in Chicago lacked the kind of mass organizing and militancy of the 1930s and World War II, or the late 1960s and 1970s. Where was the fury? Riots did not come and protests remained subdued . . . at least until the 1960s, but why? In part, the relatively moderate political environment of the postwar period developed because any kind of radical response to the housing crisis met resistance in many forms. Residents who stood up to the rocks and intimidation thrown at them faced further violence.16 Individuals and organizations who spoke out about mob violence faced redbaiting and repression.17 And all black Chicagoans ran up against the opposition, or at least the inertia, of a political system in which officials at every level were interested in preserving the Democratic machine above all else. If political functionaries paid attention to race at all, they were either focused on trading patronage for votes, or they were tied to a program of maintain-

122

chapter four

ing the appearance of racial “peace.” The Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations, the Mayor’s Commission on New Residents, the Illinois Interracial Council, the Catholic Interracial Council, and many similar organizations took as their main goal the preservation of peace. The pioneering black historian based in Chicago, Lerone Bennett Jr., hit the right note when he argued in 1964 that white liberals “have two basic aims, to prevent polarization and to prevent racial conflict.”18 As biographers Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor also note, the machine’s leader, Mayor Richard J. Daley, sought to eliminate any discussion of race from urban development plans, ultimately arguing that race and housing were not political issues.19 Violence and intimidation on the edges of the ghetto, repression and inertia from white liberals and the machine—all this seems to have overwhelmed black Chicagoans’ efforts to improve their lives through protest politics in the middle of the twentieth century. But it must also be acknowledged that relatively few black Chicagoans, especially those in positions of leadership, had much of an incentive to pursue a truly radical program of protest politics. World War II and the postwar economic boom brought unprecedented economic opportunity to black Chicago. Infuriating as the conditions were, flawed as the political system clearly was, it remained possible to believe in the promise that one’s family, and black Chicagoans as a whole, would make substantial progress if they kept on plugging along and fighting day to day for improved conditions in their local communities. Chicago’s unusual mix of increasing opportunity for some black residents and deepening racial exclusion defined the city’s political culture.

The Postwar Housing Shortage: No Greater Social Problem Black Chicagoans faced no greater social problem after the war than the housing shortage. White Chicagoans also faced unprecedented housing shortages in the 1940s—the city’s overall vacancy rates fell from 3.9 percent in 1940 to less than 1 percent between 1942 and 1950—but conditions were far worse, on the whole, for black Chicagoans.20 In areas where the population was more than 99 percent black, gross population densities increased from 46,700 to 54,000 persons per square mile, while in the city as a whole the average density increased from 16,000 to 17,000 individuals per square mile.21 And in black neighborhoods the proportion of officially designated “crowded households”—those with more than 1.5 persons per

a decent place to live

123

room—increased from 25.3 percent in 1940 to 31.1 percent in 1950, while the proportion in the city as a whole only increased from 5.9 percent to 6.4 percent.22 Housing for workers in the wartime defense industries and for war veterans and their families had been intended to alleviate the problem. During World War II, the Chicago Housing Authority built 4,881 units, of which 4,147 were slated for black residents.23 Yet with veterans back home and mass southern migration continuing, an already desperate situation continued to grow worse. Between 1945 and 1950, only about 6,600 houses were built every year in the entire city, hardly enough to solve the problem.24 Statistics help measure the scope of the housing problem in the postwar period, but they can hide the intensity of the personal problems individuals and their families faced in the postwar city. In 1950, the Chicago Urban League sponsored an episode of the groundbreaking Destination Freedom radio series created and written by black journalist Richard Durham. Destination Freedom aired for two years on Sunday mornings on WMAQ, until the producers found Durham to be too confrontational on racial issues.25 Durham ran into one of the subtle, but powerful, ways that the liberal consensus on matters of race and housing was maintained, by silencing the voices that would pinpoint the causes of black Chicagoans’ housing problems. The February 5, 1950, episode, funded by the League, brought listeners into the living room of a working-class black couple, Jack and Marge Warren, who had nearly run out of housing options. Durham put a face— a white realtor’s face—on the cause of their problems. The show began with Jack hurrying to a rental agency, arriving about ten minutes after the agency had called him to let him know there was an open apartment. But when he arrives, the young, white, female clerk at the front desk hesitates. Jack is frantic. “Don’t tell me somebody else got the apartment! I brought the advance rent. . . . Here’s my identification—Gee, I hope you haven’t given that place to someone else.” The flustered clerk calls her boss, Mr. Wilkins. “This gentleman is next on our rental list,” she says. “His application’s been in since ’45.” Jack greets Wilkins with relief, “I’d just about given up hope.” Wilkins flatly confirms that Jack ought to have given up. “You won’t need any advance rent,” Wilkins declares, tearing up the application and ordering the clerk to do the same to “every application that’s marked with the letter ‘C’!” “I don’t understand,” the clerk stammers. And Wilkins explains, “My dear child. ‘C’ stands for ‘colored.’ We’re clearing out those old applications. We accepted those when

chapter four

124

the firm owned those buildings in the Negro neighborhood. We sold out, remember?” “But there’s a vacancy on Peoria Street,” the clerk replies. “For white tenants, child. Examine Mr. Warren. You’re not color blind, are you?” Wilkins turns to Jack, “I’m sure you understand that we no longer own property out your way. It’s quite impossible to rent you a place anywhere else but in the, er—Negro section. You and your family wouldn’t really be comfortable living outside of it.” And Jack replies, “How comfortable do you think we’re living now?” Jack returns home to tell his wife, Marge, that he’s given up. But she won’t let him. jack: I’m tired, Marge, I don’t want to talk about housing. marge: I’ll keep talking about it until we get it. jack: (Flat) Where? marge: (Wild and fast) Someplace! I see ’em advertised in the papers. Homes for sale right here in the paper. Apartments for sale. Housing shortage isn’t as bad as you make it! (Rattles Paper). jack: Oh no! Not if you make twenty grand a year, it isn’t. What have we got? marge: Well, what about those Housing Projects they were going to put up so fast? The CHA picked seven places to put up housing projects. What about ’em? jack: How would I know? marge: Somebody knows! Jack—(Pause) Did you read about the fire in that kitchenette building on 56th and South Parkway? The children— jack: (Subdued) (Cuts In) I read it. marge: (Pause) I wonder about this building. jack: (Pause) OK, Marge. I won’t stop looking. narrator: He won’t stop. He’s one of two hundred and fifty thousand home seekers hemmed into a city within a city. . . . Yes, Jack will look around among sections of modern well-kept homes—but he will also look into deeper sections of dilapidated shacks, substandard buildings, and kitchenettes where the death rate of children is two and a half times greater than that of children in any other section of the city.

In the end all the Warrens could find was a one-room apartment “eight flights up in the back of a building on 31st and Lake Park” for twenty-two dollars per week, with no private bath, no hot water, no furnishings, no heat. The new public housing Marge mentioned had been planned under the 1949 Housing Act, but it had not been built because white Chicagoans opposed the construction of public housing in their neighborhoods. And black Chicagoans were facing violence whenever they tried to move into

a decent place to live

125

previously all-white public housing. Durham concluded, “the mob violence behind housing riots is an organized affair because it pays off for those determined to fleece both Negro and white families, playing one against the other and milking profits out of the housing shortage and out of the high-rent ghetto on the South Side where super-profits are made on the over-crowding of 450,000 Negro citizens.”26 The dilemma facing the fictional Warrens was all too real for workingclass black Chicagoans. They, too, encountered nightmare landlords, discrimination from realtors, a government that failed to build new housing for black residents, and white Chicagoans who refused to allow blacks to move in next door. The everyday realities of struggles to find housing kept them on the move, often within relatively small parts of the city, and uncertain about where they would live next. To struggle against that uncertainty was, in the context of day-to-day life, to not give up, to continue fighting racial exclusion itself. Without the luxury of time or the legal or political networks necessary to mount a more radical challenge to the conditions limiting their freedom, black Chicagoans engaged with institutions like the Chicago Urban League to try to improve their immediate situations. The Urban League proved to be better at documenting and dramatizing the housing problem than it was at addressing its everyday causes and effects. Indeed, the League has been faulted for treating the “symptoms” rather than the “causes” of urban problems.27 Why did reformers like those who worked for the League continue to pursue frustratingly ineffective social work efforts? Why did people who worked to document the systemic forces of segregation and discrimination remain committed to efforts to help individuals with their social problems? The answers to these questions must begin with the pervasive, desperate, immediate need for housing on the part of people from nearly all sectors of the black working class. At the peak of the housing crisis, between 1946 and 1949, hundreds of black Chicagoans appealed to the Urban League’s “social problems” caseworkers for assistance. The records of 126 of those encounters survive. The narratives they contain break down assumptions about who applied to the League for assistance. People came from nearly every corner of black Chicago. Old-settlers and newcomers, young and old, men and women, single people and married couples, people living with nuclear families and those sharing homes with extended families, the unemployed and workers holding a diverse range of jobs—they all came to the League for help. The records thus reveal the universality of the housing

chapter four

126

crisis, the immediate needs that inspired reformers who continued to treat the “symptoms” of segregation, and, significantly, how black Chicagoans survived and sustained neighborhood networks in the face of the crisis. The League had built its reputation during and after World War I by helping newcomers adjust to the city. By the late 1940s, only one-quarter of the 126 applicants to the League’s social problems offices had arrived in the two years prior to going to the League. Approximately 60 percent of the applicants had arrived in Chicago eight or more years before going to the League, and fully half had been in the city for at least fourteen years prior to their visit (fig. 5). The Urban League’s clients came from nearly every part of the Black Metropolis. Although a large portion lived near the Urban League’s building in the former Frederick Douglass Center at 3032 South Wabash Street, applicants came from five community areas between Roosevelt Avenue (12th Street) on the north and 51st Street on the south. The following two maps show the places of residence of the sample of 126 people who

40 40

Number of Applicants

35 30 25

26

25 20 15

13

12

10

10

21+ Yea rs

1420 Yea rs

ars 8-1 3 Ye

3-7

Yea r

s

s Yea r 1-2